Traces of the outbreak are evident in the genetic makeup of people from that area, they’ve found. The researchers analyzed the genomes of more than 2,500 modern humans from 26 worldwide populations, to better understand how humans have adapted to historical coronavirus outbreaks. The team used computational methods to uncover genetic traces of adaptation to coronaviruses, the family of viruses responsible for three major outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the past 20 years, there have been three outbreaks of epidemic severe coronaviruses: SARS-CoV leading to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which originated in China in 2002 and killed more than 800 people; MERS-CoV leading to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which killed more than 850 people; and SARS-CoV-2 leading to COVID-19, which has killed 3.8 million people. But this study of the evolution of the human genome has revealed another large coronavirus epidemic broke out thousands of …