The Silk Road is an ancient and famous merchant path that ran from China to Rome. It connected numerous civilizations for many centuries, allowing for the trade of goods and information across huge distances. It also apparently allowed for the trade of infectious diseases.
Recent archeology of the Xuanquanzhi relay station, on the eastern side of the Tamrin Basin near the Taklamakan Desert has found long buried “personal hygiene sticks” which acted as the ancient precursor to toilet paper. These sticks, which are around 2,000 years old still have traces of human feces, which in turn contained traces of several parasites, like roundworm, whipworm, tapeworm, and Chinese liver fluke.
Cambridge University researchers found these parasites by looking at the fecal traces under a microscope.
The fact that ancient people had parasitic worms isn’t surprising, but the findings show that the Silk Road may have been one path though which infectious diseases, parasitic or otherwise, were able to move across Eurasia.
Take the Chinese liver fluke, for example. This worm needs a marshy area with lots of water to complete its life cycle, and the closest place to Xuanquanzhi where it could have found that was about 1,500 km away. That means that the worm wasn’t living at the relay station, but was brought there by whoever left behind their personal hygiene stick.
There have been suggestions in the past that diseases like bubonic plague, anthrax, or leprosy may have moved across the Silk Road, but “our study is the first to use archaeological evidence from a site on the Silk Road to demonstrate that travelers were taking infectious diseases with them over these huge distances,” said Hui-Yuan Yeh, one of the researchers.
Other possibilities for disease transmission paths to Western Europe include trade routes through India, Mongolia, or Russia. But the Silk Road, unlike these other routes, would have seen people moving more quickly, since the whole point was to get from one end to the other. The spread of disease between more sedentary communities would be much slower, and the Silk Road also provides a more direct route for infection.