In the year 711, an Umayyad army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and put an end to the Visigoth kingdom in less than a generation, initiating a great upheaval in the Iberian Peninsula with many changes. Kingdoms that were born and died, power struggles and great mobility that began to shape the foundations of modern Europe. However, north of Burgos, a small group of people seemed to know absolutely nothing.
Where. The rural site of Las Gobas, in northern Spain, offers a vision of life far from those centers of power. One of the most outstanding medieval rock communities on the peninsula, located in the county of Treviño, near the town of Laño. Here the inhabitants dug churches, homes and graves directly into the limestone, where they began to live and die there for five centuries. And now we know that they did it with their backs to the world.
How do we know? At the moment we do not have any time machine to see what happened in the past, but a scientific study revealed the secrets of this enigmatic Iberian community. Here archaeological excavations in the cemetery discovered the remains of 41 individuals from whom an attempt was made to extract their DNA.
In this case they used all the tools available to reconstruct who they were, how they were related and what diseases they carried. What we knew is that the settlement existed from the mid-6th century to the 11th century and Las Gobas had a cemetery that was used continuously from the 7th to the 11th century. But the surprising thing is that it seemed like they were always the same people.
Marry each other. The most striking finding of the study does not have to do with any virus or any fractured skull, but rather that approximately 61% of the individuals with sufficient genomic data showed signs of consanguinity, so this population was quite likely to practice inbreeding.
And it was not something slight, since in some cases the researchers saw that there were marriages between siblings or even between parents and children. In this way, the only source of genetic variability that could be had in this population was only the women who arrived from abroad to marry. Although the truth is something quite scarce.
There was no peace. It may be thought that isolation guarantees absolute peace in the population, but the first centuries of occupation were marked by brutality. The study of the bones in this case has found clear evidence that there was interpersonal violence, including serious bone injuries consistent with direct sword impacts.
An invisible enemy. If swords weren’t enough in this case, the 10th century brought with it a lethal, microscopic threat. The metagenomic analyzes carried out have made it possible to detect pathogens and zoonotic diseases, identifying traces of smallpox.
Although what is fascinating about this discovery is not only that we are facing the oldest evidence of smallpox documented in southern Europe, but also where it came from. Although the south of the peninsula was a commercial hotbed dominated by the Islamic world, smallpox did not reach the south from the Gobas. But the truth is that its genetic signature is similar to the Nordic and European strains of the time.
How did it arrive? That a disease from the Vikings or one that was present in Central Europe reached some isolated caves in Burgos is no coincidence. Here the researchers pointed to the nascent European pilgrimage routes, specifically to the first steps of the Camino de Santiago, as the entry route for the pathogen. And although the inhabitants of Las Gobas avoided mixing with their neighbors to the south, the incipient religious and commercial traffic from the north ended up breaking, at least on an epidemiological level, their isolation bubble.
Images | Wikipedia Trevino County
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