Free Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy by Robert Sallares

pestilential in summer the air of the Great Plain around Lake Tiberias and the Dead Sea.²⁰ Consequently the earliest Neolithic farmers lived in a region that included some environments that were extremely favourable for malaria.²¹ This consideration supports Angel’s hypothesis that ed to confirm their results. Sallares and Gomzi (2001) discussed the problems in applying immunological tests to ancient materials. However, the results of the studies in molecular evolution cited earlier based on comparisons of modern DNA sequences make it extremely likely in any case that P. falciparum was present in Egypt by the fourth millennium , since such research does not suffer from the same technical problems as research on ancient biomolecules. Schiff et al . (1993) described the Para Sight test.
    ¹⁸ Theocharis et al . (1997) and Pausanias 2.25.6 on the Greek pyramids.
    ¹⁹ Cavalli-Sforza et al . (1994).
    ²⁰ Josephus, de bello Iudaico 4.8.2, ed. Bekker (1855–6): ƒkpuroıtai d† ¿r6 qvrouß tÏ ped≤on, ka≥ di’ Ëperbol¶n aÛcmoı perivcei nos*dh tÏn åvra (The plain is burnt up during the summer season, and extreme drought makes the air unhealthy).
    ²¹ Tacitus Histories 5.6–7 also described the Dead Sea region as pestilential with bad air: lacus immenso ambitu . . . gravitate odoris accolis pestifer (a lake with a huge circumference . . . whose oppressive smell brings pestilence to the local inhabitants). Hirsch (1883: 202) noted that malaria affected extensive regions near the Dead Sea in the nineteenth century, as well as the Bekaa valley in Lebanon at an altitude as high as 1200 metres (cf. Leeson et al. (1950) ). Fisher (1952) made the interesting observation that mosquitoes are carried up to the Bekaa valley by rising air currents which regularly occur in that region; Amadouny (1997); Filon et al . (1995) extracted ancient DNA showing the presence of b-thalassaemia from human skeletal Evolution of malaria
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    all the three species of human malaria under consideration, including the most dangerous, P. falciparum , were carried to Europe inside the bodies of the very first Neolithic farmers. The diagnosis of thalassaemia, a human genetic disease that confers some resistance to malaria, in the skeleton Homo 25 (a male sixteen or seventeen years old) from the PPNB (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) village of Atlit Yam (now submerged off the coast of Israel) supports the idea that malaria was already active in the Levant at the dawn of agriculture.²² Given that the climate in the Neolithic period was actually exceedingly favourable to it, whether P. falciparum would have survived in new environments in southern Europe depended, as was noted earlier, on whether it encountered species of mosquito that were capable of acting as efficient vectors. Only a minority of the European species of Anopheles mosquito are good vectors for malaria.
    This problem leads on to the fourth pillar of the late-introduction theories, namely the question of the possible refractoriness of mosquitoes to infection with P. falciparum . Experiments were performed using samples of A. labranchiae , originating from the coast of Tuscany near Tarquinia, and of A. atroparvus , from the Orcia river valley near Siena and from the upper Volturno valley north of Naples, to see if these Mediterranean populations of mosquitoes could ingest gametocytes from tropical strains of P. falciparum and successfully transmit sporozoites to new hosts.²³ The results were negative, in agreement with more extensive research of this kind subsequently performed in Russia which indicated that in general tropical strains of P. falciparum are not adapted to the mosquito species of Eurasia. Zulueta used these results to argue that a long period of adaptation would have been required to overcome refractoriness on the part of mosquito species in Greece and Italy.²⁴
    However, even if this were the case, it would not prove that P. falciparum was a newcomer in