French and Estonian researchers have examined genetic material taken from a mass grave of Napoleon’s soldiers in Vilnius, Lithuania. Construction workers discovered the burial site in 2001.
The scientists sequenced the DNA of the soldiers and uncovered previously unknown reasons for their deaths during the retreat from Russia in 1812.
What new insights did the researchers gain?
Napoleon began his Russian campaign with an army of around 600,000 soldiers. Fewer than 50,000 survived. Previous studies indicated that the massive Napoleonic army was nearly annihilated by starvation, enemy attacks, and the brutal winter. However, a team of geneticists from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the University of Tartu analyzed DNA from the teeth of 13 French soldiers buried during the retreat in a mass grave. The researchers found that other deadly factors included diseases that had not been considered in this context before.
Previously, scientists learned that infectious diseases such as typhus and trench fever played a significant role in the destruction of the French army. However, the new analysis of the mass burial of French soldiers did not find traces of the bacteria that cause these diseases, as reported by Live Science.
Instead, the researchers identified two other pathogens: Salmonella enterica, which causes typhoid fever (also called enteric fever), and Borrelia recurrentis, the bacterium that causes relapsing fever. Relapsing fever is different from typhus: symptoms last for several days and then return.
Thus, the team believes that the soldiers were weakened by relapsing fever caused by Borrelia recurrentis or died from typhoid fever caused by Salmonella enterica.
As Dr. Nicholas Rascovan, the lead author of the study, explained to BBC Science Focus, combining the results of previous studies with the current one suggests that at least four different diseases were involved. He said, “They were likely infected with a whole spectrum of pathogens.”
Therefore, this new discovery does not rule out the presence of other diseases that contributed to the deaths of Napoleon’s soldiers. The authors wrote, “Given the extreme and harsh conditions characteristic of this retreat, the presence of multiple concurrent infections is likely. A plausible scenario for the deaths of these soldiers would be a combination of exhaustion, colds, and several diseases.”
The results of the study were published in the journal Current Biology.
