Recently, the latest research from France's Pasteur Institute found that the almost "annihilation" of the army during Napoleon's Russian campaign in 1812 was probably not due to hunger and cold and the common typhus, but was most likely caused by two infectious diseases, paratyphoid and relapsing fever.
In the summer of 1812, the French Emperor Napoleon led an army of 500,000 to invade the Russian Empire. However, in December of that year, only a few remnants of the army remained.
For years, historians have debated the reasons for the collapse of Napoleon's army.
According to the accounts of military doctors and officers at the time, they all pointed to typhus, and this infectious disease was quite common in the army at that time.
Previously, historians found body lice (the main vector of typhus) in the remains of Napoleon's soldiers and the detection of DNA from Rickettsia prowazekii (the pathogenic bacteria that causes typhus), further confirming this speculation.Napoleon's army retreated through what is now Vilnius, Lithuania.
To find out, researchers extracted DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers from a mass grave in Vilnius, specifically isolating and identifying DNA fragments from bacterial pathogens.
However, the findings did not find the typhus pathogen;Salmonella enterica (a bacterium that causes paratyphoid) and Borrelia burgdorferi (a bacterium that causes relapsing fever) transmitted by body licetraces, indicating that Napoleon's army may not have been defeated by typhus.
The researchers attributed the new discovery to differences in sequencing technology.
Ancient DNA is highly degraded into extremely tiny fragments, making it difficult for past detection techniques to apply. However, new technologies can capture a wider range of DNA sources based on these very short ancient DNA sequences.
Currently, the research results have been published in the international journal Current Biology.
