Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that quietly slipped into our chromosomes and never left. By tracing this viral ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Ancient DNA has revealed that a common childhood herpesvirus was infecting—and even embedding itself into human genomes—thousands of years ago. The findings show a deep, shared evolutionary history ...

For the first time, scientists have reconstructed ancient genomes of Human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) from archaeological human remains more than two millennia old. The study, led by the ...