CARTA Symposium: Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans & Our Origins
As the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates, infectious diseases can have profound influences on their host populations. Human evolution has unquestionably been shaped by past infections. However, humans have also shaped pathogen dynamics and virulence via a multitude of factors.
Some ancient human influences range from changes in social organization, group size, and the exploitation of more varied ecosystems. More recently, developments such as settlement, agriculture, technology, rapid long-distance travel, medicine, and global economic integration, continue to shape epidemics and the human host populations. The goal of this public symposium is to explore how infectious agents and humans shape each other’s evolutionary trajectories.
