The study of ancient DNA is emerging into a discipline of its own, with the subjects ranging from a plethora of species to extinct (archaic) humans. Accordingly, the information of ancestral pathogens is just beginning to promote our understanding of microbial transmission, epidemics and disease pathogenesis.
With a long-standing interest in virus genome tissue persistence (Söderlund, Lancet 1997; Norja, PNAS 2006; Pyöriä, Nat Commun 2017), we are time-traveling by PCRs and NGS for viral nucleic acid sequences in archival human tissue remains (skeletal; soft) from a large variety of sources dating back decades, centuries and millennia.