US EditionDNA From Napoleon's Ill-Fated 1812 Army Reveals What Likely Led to the Soldiers' Demise
- On October 24, geneticist Nicolás Rascovan of the Institut Pasteur reported in Current Biology that ancient DNA from Napoleonic soldiers' teeth revealed two fever-causing bacteria.
- In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte led a disastrous campaign into Moscow with 615,000 men, but only about 110,000 survived due to cold, hunger and disease.
- After extracting and sequencing DNA from 13 soldiers' teeth, the team detected Salmonella enterica in four soldiers and Borrelia recurrentis in two, pathogens causing paratyphoid and relapsing fever.
- The study challenges earlier PCR-based findings that linked typhus to the remains, finding no trace of Rickettsia prowazekii and discounting previous identifications of Bartonella quintana.
- Researchers say the finding helps trace pathogen evolution, although Rascovan cautioned the study sampled a tiny fraction of casualties and cannot determine infection prevalence.
112 Articles
112 Articles
DNA Reveals the Deadly Secret That Doomed Napoleon’s 1812 Army
Researchers have uncovered genetic evidence of paratyphoid and relapsing fever among Napoleon’s soldiers who retreated from Russia in 1812. Researchers at the Institut Pasteur have performed a genetic analysis of the remains of soldiers who took part in Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812. Their investigation uncovered traces of two infectious agents responsible for paratyphoid [...]
How Napoleon’s army met its doom
The retreat from Russia by Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Grande Armée in 1812 was a cataclysmic event that marked the beginning of the end for his empire and personal dominance in Europe, with about 300,000 soldiers perishing in a force that originally numbered roughly a half million. A new study involving DNA extracted from the teeth of 13 French soldiers who were buried in a mass grave in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius along the route of the …
The Straits Times
The TelegraphDNA from mass grave reveals pathogens that beset Napoleon's army in 1812
The retreat from Russia by Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Grande Armée in 1812 was a cataclysmic event that marked the beginning of the end for his empire and personal dominance in Europe, with about 300,000 soldiers perishing in a force that originally numbered roughly a half million. Read more at straitstimes.com.
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