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| Bishop Peder Jensen Winstrup of Lund (30 April 1605 – 28 December 1679) |
Ask a creationist to explain parasitic organisms such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis that causes tuberculosis and they almost invariably blame the Bronze Age myth of 'The Fall' when, so they claim, 'sin' entered the world and everything began to go down-hill from then on.
Apparently, they can live with the idea that there is some other creator creating nasty things that their 'omnipotent', omnibenevolent god is powerless to control . But contradictory and mutually-exclusive beliefs rarely cause creationists a problem that a wave of the hand and a blind eye can't solve.
This however, is a little more of a problem for them. Scientists examining the long-dead body of the former Bishop Peder Jensen Winstrup of Lund, Sweden, have found evidence of tuberculosis and (more importantly) shown that the organism was around in the Neolithic - way before the supposed 'Fall'!
The Bible, for instance, clearly refers to Adam toiling in fields, which places the myth firmly in a society which had invented agriculture - unknown in the Neolithic. There is certainly no suggestion that Adam & Eve used stone tools.
The story of Bishop Winstrup's TB started when Anthropologist Caroline Arcini and her colleagues at the Swedish Natural Historical Museum discovered small calcifications in his extremely well preserved lungs. Bishop Winstrup died on 28 December, 1697, almost certainly a victim of the 'White Plague' TB pandemic then ravaging post-Medieval Europe. This gave researchers TB from a precisely known date on which to base their study of the bacillus' genome.
The global distribution of TB had led researchers to assume that it must have arisen very early on in human evolution and had spread around the world with its human hosts. However, an examination of the genome from pre-contact South Americans has produced three genomes of related strains which were all closely related to the TB currently circulating in present-day seals, and comparison with other strains in the human population suggested TB emerged about 6,000 years ago. But this date was widely disputed and next to useless as it may have been based on ancient TB strains not normally associated with humans.
Bishop Winstrup's TB however leaves no doubt about its precise date or its origins in the human population and the genome that scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History were able to recover from it was of a very high quality. This enabled them to confirm that Mycobacterium tuberculosis did indeed emerge in the pre-agricultural, Neolithic era and certainly not in the age in which the myth of Adam and Eve and 'The Fall' is set where people had gardens and men 'toiled in the fields'.
Their research findings were published open access recently in Genome Biology.
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| CT image of Ranke complex. CT image of Peder Winstrup’s chest in a slightly angled axial plane with the short arrow showing a small calcified granuloma in the probable upper lobe of the collapsed right lung, and two approximately 5 mm calcifications in the right hilum together suggesting a Ranke complex and previous primary tuberculosis. The more lateral of the two hilar calcifications was extracted for further analysis. In addition, there are calcifications in the descending aorta proposing atherosclerosis (arrowhead) |
Abstract
Background
Although tuberculosis accounts for the highest mortality from a bacterial infection on a global scale, questions persist regarding its origin. One hypothesis based on modern Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) genomes suggests their most recent common ancestor followed human migrations out of Africa approximately 70,000 years before present. However, studies using ancient genomes as calibration points have yielded much younger dates of less than 6000 years. Here, we aim to address this discrepancy through the analysis of the highest-coverage and highest-quality ancient MTBC genome available to date, reconstructed from a calcified lung nodule of Bishop Peder Winstrup of Lund (b. 1605–d. 1679).
Results
A metagenomic approach for taxonomic classification of whole DNA content permitted the identification of abundant DNA belonging to the human host and the MTBC, with few non-TB bacterial taxa comprising the background. Genomic enrichment enabled the reconstruction of a 141-fold coverage M. tuberculosis genome. In utilizing this high-quality, high-coverage seventeenth-century genome as a calibration point for dating the MTBC, we employed multiple Bayesian tree models, including birth-death models, which allowed us to model pathogen population dynamics and data sampling strategies more realistically than those based on the coalescent.
Conclusions
The results of our metagenomic analysis demonstrate the unique preservation environment calcified nodules provide for DNA. Importantly, we estimate a most recent common ancestor date for the MTBC of between 2190 and 4501 before present and for Lineage 4 of between 929 and 2084 before present using multiple models, confirming a Neolithic emergence for the MTBC.
Sabin, Susanna; Herbig, Alexander; Vågene, Åshild J.; Ahlström, Torbjörn; Bozovic, Gracijela; Arcini, Caroline; Kühnert, Denise; Bos, Kirsten I.
A seventeenth-century Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome supports a Neolithic emergence of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.
Genome Biol 21, 201 (2020). DOI:10.1186/s13059-020-02112-1
Copyright: © 2020 The authors, published by Springer Nature.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0).
In other words, science has shown that the Creationist claim that these parasitic organisms arose only after this mythical 'Fall', are nonsense. Creationists need to find some other excuse to absolve their favourite deity of any responsibility for its more malevolent creations, if they are going to insist it created everything. Tweet
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