bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.23.217141; this version posted July 23, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Ancient DNA of Rickettsia felis and Toxoplasma gondii implicated in the death of a hunter- 2 gatherer boy from South Africa, 2,000 years ago 3 4 Riaan F. Rifkin1,2,*,†, Surendra Vikram1,†, Jean-Baptiste J. Ramond1,2,3, Don A. Cowan1, Mattias 5 Jakobsson4,5,6, Carina M. Schlebusch4,5,6, Marlize Lombard5,* 6 7 1 Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics, Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, University of 8 Pretoria, Hatfield, South Africa. 9 2 Department of Anthropology and Geography, Human Origins and Palaeoenvironmental Research Group, Oxford Brookes 10 University, Oxford, UK. 11 3 Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile. 12 4 Department of Organismal Biology, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen, Uppsala, Sweden. 13 5 Palaeo-Research Institute, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, South Africa. 14 6 SciLifeLab, Uppsala, Sweden. 15 16 *Corresponding authors (
[email protected],
[email protected]). 17 † Contributed equally to this work. 18 19 The Stone Age record of South Africa provides some of the earliest evidence for the biological 20 and cultural origins of Homo sapiens. While there is extensive genomic evidence for the selection 21 of polymorphisms in response to pathogen-pressure in sub-Saharan Africa, there is insufficient 22 evidence for ancient human-pathogen interactions in the region.