A newly published study of the mummies in the crypt of the Church of the Whites in the town of Vác, northern Hungary, has found they harbored multiple strains of tuberculosis all descended from a common ancestor in the late Roman period (396-470 A.D.). Contemporary TB infections are usually caused by a single strain.

The remains of 265 townspeople buried in the crypt between 1731 and 1838 were discovered in 1994 by a construction worker doing repairs on the church. The vault had been bricked in decades before and forgotten, leaving the cool, dry air and the anti-bacterial, fluid-absorbing properties of the wood chips placed under their bodies and of their elaborately painted pine coffins to naturally mummify the bodies and preserve even their clothing in the most exceptionally pristine condition. After X-rays at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest found evidence of tuberculosis in the bones, subsequent studies determined that 89% of the mummies had been infected with the tuberculosis pathogen at some point in their lives although only 35% of them were actively suffering from the disease at the time of their death.

The prevalence of tuberculosis in the group, their apparent resistance to the disease and the pre-Industrial, pre-antibiotic timeline of their deaths provided researchers with a rare opportunity to study tuberculosis during its peak infection years for invaluable information about how it was spread and how people’s immune systems fought the infection. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Warwick, the University of Birmingham, University College London, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest extracted DNA from samples drawn from 26 of the Vác mummies that were known to have harbored TB pathogens. Using a methodology called shotgun metagenomics to extract tuberculosis DNA directly from the samples rather than attempting to isolate and culture the pathogen, the team was able to get results in days rather than weeks.

They found 14 examples of TB DNA in eight bodies. Five of the eight bodies sampled harbored multiple M. tuberculosis genome sequences for a total of 12 different strains. One body had three different strains of tuberculosis. Mixed infections like this are rare in Europe and America today, but in areas of the world where TB is still prevalent one out of five patients have multi-strain infections. The people in this study died when TB was at peak prevalence in Europe, killing millions as the White Plague.

They also discovered that the samples from two bodies known to have been mother and child — Anna Schöner (mother, died 1793) and Terézia Hausmann (daughter, 28 years old, died 1797) — shared the same two genotypes.

Our analyses on these bodies provide the first evidence of an intimate epidemiological link between TB infections in two long-dead individuals, supporting mother–child transmission, or vice versa, or infection from a common source. More striking is that we obtained the same two M. tuberculosis genotypes, albeit in different proportions, from samples from both bodies. It remains unclear whether this shared within-host diversity in mother and daughter stems from multiple episodes of infection or from a single transmission event of more than one strain. These findings add weight to the claim that within-host diversity poses a challenge when attempting to infer the nature and direction of disease transmission. Interestingly, two samples from Terézia Hausmann’s lung yielded different proportions of the two genotypes, perhaps suggesting fine-grained spatial heterogeneity in the distribution of strains

What a complicated disease TB is. No wonder it takes half a year of intense antibiotic treatment to cure (if the strain isn’t resistant, that is).

The metagenomics approach appears to be more effective at identifying multiple TB strains in samples than the microbiological culture approach. This method could prove a signficant improvement in the diagnosis of modern TB infections and opens the door to new treatment possibilities in the age of antibiotic resistance. The Warwick Medical School team has now successfully used metagenomics to identify the lineages of TB bacteria in contemporary samples. That study was published last September, but was actually performed after the pathogen strains were extracted from the Vác mummies, so the 18th century victims of the White Plague have already helped today’s victims by giving them a much faster and more accurate method to identify the bacteria causing their illness. That’s an important step in finding more effective, targeted treatment protocols.

Here, we have confirmed the remarkably high prevalence of TB within an affluent, urbanized, but largely pre-industrial, Central European population. By showing that historical strains can be accurately mapped to contemporary lineages, we have ruled out, for early modern Europe, the kind of scenario recently proposed for the Americas, that is, wholesale replacement of one major lineage by another (with a different host range and presumed pathogen biology) and have confirmed the genotypic continuity of an infection that has ravaged the heart of Europe since prehistoric times. With TB resurgent in many parts of the world, including Hungary, the struggle to control this ancient infection is far from over.

The skeletal remains of a soldier unearthed at the Waterloo battlefield in June of 2012 has been identified. He was 23-year-old Friedrich Brandt, a private in the 2nd line battalion of the King’s German Legion, felled by a French musket shot to the chest during the Battle of Waterloo on June 18th, 1815. Although the identification cannot be confirmed with DNA analysis because no descendants are known, the circumstantial evidence makes a strong case.

Like a certain other historical figure whose remains were discovered in 2012, Brandt’s skeleton was found underneath a parking lot (an overspill lot for the battlefield visitor’s center). His skull was destroyed by mechanical diggers clearing the area for the planned reconstruction of the visitor’s center, but as soon as the crew realized they’d unearthed human remains they alerted the Ministry of Archaeology for the region of Walloon Brabant and archaeologists excavated the rest of the skeleton which was virtually intact, missing only a foot and some hand bones. They found the deceased also had something else in common with the other personage found under a parking lot: a spinal curvature that would have rendered him unfit for battle by modern standards. He was slight at just 5’1″ tall.

The young man had been hastily buried under 15 inches of soil, probably by his comrades who carried his moribund or dead body 109 yards behind the British front line in the shadow of what is today Lion Mount — a monument built in 1820 on the site where the Prince of Orange was wounded constructed out of 390,000 cubic yards of earth removed from the battlefield — but which in 1815 was the escarpment at the center of Wellington’s line. Victor Hugo describes the altered terrain poetically in Volume 2, Chapter 7 of Les Misérables:

Where the great pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe. The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other, the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole of that plain is a sepulchre for France.

Found with the soldier’s remains were 20 coins, an iron spoon, an unidentified wooden object with the initials “CB” and the date 1792 carved into it, the remains of the leather epaulets from his uniform, a flint and a small red sphere that nobody seems interested in explaining but we were all pretty curious about when it was discovered three years ago. The coins were corroded and only a half franc from 1811 could immediately be identified. Once cleaned, the coins were found to be German and French amounting to a month’s wages for a private in the King’s German Legion.

Researchers were hoping the epaulets might help identify which regiment the soldier had belonged to, but alas that came to naught. The only additional piece of evidence they were able to find was on the wooden object with the initials. Additional tests performed this February revealed that there was another initial before the CB, an F.

The discovery of the first initial was the breakthrough Gareth Glover, military historian, former Royal Navy officer and treasurer of the Waterloo Association, needed. KGL troops been positioned close to the area where the remains were found. When he checked the KGL muster rolls, he found only three soldiers with the initial FB. One had survived the battle. One died in the hospital in August of 1815. One was Friedrich Brand.

The King’s German Legion was formed after Napoleon conquered Hanover in 1803 and disbanded its army. King George III of England was also Prince-Elector of Hanover, so when his soldiers fled the French occupation, he welcomed them in England. KGL infantry, when they weren’t fighting the French mainly in Spain and Portugal, were quartered in barracks at Bexhill-on-Sea from 1804 until Napoleon’s first abdication in April 1814. Bexhill was a small village of about 100 houses with a population of 2,000. The arrival of 5,000-6,000 troops was initially jarring to the locals who compared them to Cossacks, but they soon settled in and became valued members of the community.

In August of 1814 the 5,000 KGL troops in Bexhill were ordered to return to the continent, much to the dismay of the Bexhillians who had come to love their German friends who sang so beautifully at St. Peter’s church, spent their wages so generously in the shops and hostelries and married their daughters. When Napoleon returned from exile on Elba and took his final stand at Waterloo, the KGL played a key role in the Allied victory, valiantly defending the farm of La Haye Sante 200 yards in front of the center of the
Allied line from late morning until they ran out of ammunition around 6:00 PM. Out of 360 KGL troops holding La Haye Sante, only 39 survived the French onslaught.

The rest of the King’s German Legion fought on Wellington’s right flank between Merbe Braine and Hougoumont farm. Private Brandt was part of this group. Glover believes he was slain in the early afternoon between 1:00 and 4:00 PM before his battalion advanced on Hougoumont.

Mr Glover said: “No-one can be 100% sure that the skeleton is Friedrich Brandt but with the information we have, this candidate is by far the most likely.”

It’s amazing they got anywhere near so educated a guess. Brandt’s is the only complete skeleton recovered from the Waterloo battlefield in two centuries. Close to 50,000 people died in that battle, but the Allied victors claimed their dead and buried them in consecrated ground while the French were burned or buried in mass graves. The graves were picked clean in the 1830s and 40s, the bones ground up to make valuable fertilizer for farmers and the teeth harvested for dentures that became known by the macabre moniker of “Waterloo teeth.”

To commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo this summer, Belgium is planning a number of special events and exhibitions. The skeleton will be part of an exhibition that opens in May at the Waterloo Battlefield museum, after which I hope he is buried with all due honors.

Starting in the 3rd century with the Romans, chalk was quarried from the limestone of the Picard plateau underneath the northern French town of Naours. The digging continued long after the quarrying, so much so that eventually an entire underground city was carved out of the stone, a network of man-made caves with 3 kilometers (2 miles) of roads, 300 rooms, piazzas, three chapels, cowsheds, six chimneys and a bakery with ovens. The locals used it as hiding place during the Middle Ages and early modern era when the area was subject to an endless succession of conflicts and invasions among them the Hundred Years’ War, the peasant revolt of the Jacquerie, the Burgundian Wars, the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Year’s War. During the upheavals of the French Revolution the Naours caves were used to smuggle contraband. As many as 3,000 people plus their livestock could take refuge in the underground city.

The entrance was closed off in the 19th century and the caves fell into obscurity until a local priest rediscovered the site in 1887. It became a well-known tourist attraction after that and its location 25 miles behind the front lines of the Somme must have made it a popular destination for Allied troops stationed in the area during World War I. Allied forces did use Vignacourt, just five miles to the west of the caves, as a staging area, however troops were not quartered in the Naours tunnels, nor was there a field hospital in the caves as there were in some of the other underground shelters carved out of the limestone elsewhere in Picardy.

That’s why it was such a surprise to Gilles Prilaux, an archaeologist with France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), when he discovered thousands of graffiti carved on the walls of the caves by World War I soldiers. Prilaux began studying the tunnel network last July as part of a three-year project to learn more about the site’s use during the Middle Ages when he found the marks of far more recent history. While soldier graffiti is plentiful in shelters like the massive 15-mile tunnel network at Arras, they were on the front lines and Allied troops actually lived there. The soldiers who left their mark in the walls of Naours were just visiting.

Texan photographer and doctor Jeffrey Gusky started documenting the graffiti last December. By his tally, there are almost 2,000 names etched into the walls: 731 Australians, 339 British, 55 Americans, a few French and Canadians and 662 others of unknown nationality for a total of 1,821. Chichester University historian Ross Wilson notes that the extraordinary density of graffiti in the Naours caves give them “one of the highest concentrations on inscriptions on the Western Front.”

Prilaux thinks that the young soldiers from distant countries would have heard about the famous “Naours caves” and taken advantage of a break from war to do some sight-seeing.

That idea is backed by an entry in the diary of Wilfred Joseph Allan Allsop, a 23-year-old private from Sydney, Australia. “At 1 p.m. 10 of us went to the famous Caves near Naours where refugees used to hide in times of Invasion” Allsop wrote on Jan. 2, 1917. […]

One of the most moving inscriptions at Naours was made by Herbert John Leach, a 25-year-old from Adelaide. His inscription reads “HJ Leach. Merely a private. 13/7/16. SA Australia.”

Barely a month after Leach added his name to the wall he was killed in action on Aug. 23, 1916, during the Battle of Pozieres.

On his grave, in the Australian cemetery in nearby Flers, his father inscribed “Duty Nobly Done.”