Title:
National Geographic Society profiles UP researcher who traces ancient human diseases
Published:
University of Pretoria (UP), 20 October 2020
From the article:
Dr Riaan Rifkin, a Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria (UP), was honoured with a profile in a recent edition of National Geographic Society for his work on tracing the DNA of ancient human diseases.
The National Geographic Society funds his research at the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG) at UP. Spending time in cave sites, searching for ancient DNA in sediments and human remains, is part of Dr Rifkin’s daily routine. He is looking for clues concerning the past prevalence of common and novel human diseases. He wants to find out “which diseases plagued ancient humans, and which of these were taken to Europe and Asia as our ancestors left Africa to populate these regions. Our ancestors knew how to overcome illnesses at that time,” he says.