Frederik Valeur Seersholm

Project title

Prehistoric Plague as a Reset Mechanism for Civilisation

What is your project about?

My project is about the prehistoric form of plague, and how it may have shaped our shared history.    

During the end of the Neolithic time period, 5,000 years ago, Northern Europe underwent a population collapse that led to the dissapearance of the stone age farmers that used to occupy the region. Recent ancient DNA findings have identified an early form of the bacterium that causes plague around the time of this population decline. Naturally, this finding has led to a debate of the role of plague in the population collapse 5,000 years ago. However, currently very little concrete evidence exist to support this idea, and it is simply not known whether the prehistoric plague was a harmless bacteria or a deadly disease.    

My project aims to address this by assesing the impact that the prehistoric plague had on societies in the Neolithic and the Bronze age through DNA sequencing, C14 dating and pollen analyses.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

As long as I can remember I've had a passion both for science and for archaeology. Despite choosing the Molecular Biomedicine programme for my undergrad, I often found myself drifting towards topics within history and archaeology. It goes without saying that when I heard about the field of 'ancient DNA' which works at the intersection between science and archaeology I was sold! Thus, I convinced one of the researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark to let med do a Master's Thesis with him. I ended up analysing DNA from ancient kitchen middens – and I haven't looked back since.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

One of the main challenges in ancient pathogen DNA today comes from our inability to directly assess disease virulence. Because of the very serious ethical concerns associated with reviving a long gone disease in a laboratory setting, we are not able to directly characterise extinct diseases. Instead, we rely on circumstantial data from the genetic makeup of these diseases to make inferences of disease virulence.    

In this project, I propose to estimate the impact that plague had on societies 5,000 years ago, by combining three independent lines of evidence based on DNA, pollen and radiocarbon dating.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

TexI anticipate that my project will impact society in two main areas. Firstly, this project will allow my research group and myself to characterise why the original farmers of Europe dissapeared. This will help us answer why Europeans look the way they do today, as the dissapearance of the first farmers of Europe probably triggered the expansion of the Yamnayas, which are the ancestors of all modern Europeans. Secondly, this research has a strong focus on danish passage graves. We will sequence DNA from skeletons excavated from some of the most well known and well described of these graves. By sequencing, not only plague DNA, but also human DNA, we will be able to tell how people were related to each other within each grave. Such analyses will provide important information on social relations and kinship patterns in Neolithic Denmark, which in turn will add value back to the collections.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

First and foremost, this grant will allow me to hire a PhD student and a postdoc and formally start my own research group. I will also gain invaluable resarch and leadership experience over the course of this programme. Taken together, these career advancements should put me in a favorable position for competetive international grants such as the ERC starting grant, which I hope to apply for towards the end of my Sapere Aude project.