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This is one of the most infamous military campaigns in the last centuries, says Nicolás Rascovan, the head of the microbial paleogenomics unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. This is based on a mix of historical accounts, the discovery of body lice on the remains of soldiers (which carried the pathogens that transmitted the ailments), and DNA analyses conducted nearly a decade ago. And so a pair of archaeologists asked Rascovan, who studies the DNA of ancient pathogens, to see what other afflictions he might be able to turn up in the remains of a mass grave in Lithuania. This paper shows clearly how complex these types of analyses are and the extreme level of skill required to work with these types of data," says Leslie Quade, a paleopathologist at the Austrian Archaeological Institute who didn't participate in the research."