absolutely fascinating to me that paleogenetics is now suggesting that the Antonine Plague that wiped out 5-10 million people in the second century was *probably not* smallpox, and that the disease we know as smallpox didn’t emerge until around the 1500s???

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/smallpoxs-antiquity-in-doubt/B15B505D959E90824B6B9DCFAB1FA124