Ebola Is 50 Times Older Than Mankind

The tiger and the elephant and the polar bear may be stars at the Buffalo Zoo, but it was a humble wallaby that helped scientists prove Ebola is tens of millions of years old, not a mere 10 millennia, as was previously supposed.
The determination was made in recent years by scientists at the University of Buffalo who tested wallaby hair from the zoo along with a brown bat snared on campus to confirm what they had identified in existing databases for the first time: The genetic material of various small animals contains “fossil” fragments of filoviruses, the family that includes Ebola and Marburg.
“Who knew that the bats in the attic as well as modern marsupials harbored fossil gene copies of the group of viruses that is most lethal to humans?” co-author Dr. Derek Taylor said when the paper was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology in 2010. “Our findings demonstrate that filoviruses are, at a minimum, between 10 million and 24 million years old, and probably much older.”
Unlike other viruses such as HIV, the filoviruses lack the capacity to create their own DNA and were therefore assumed to be incapable of inserting themselves into a host's genetic makeup.
Taylor and his co-authors, Dr. Jeremy Bruenn and Dr. Robert Leach, came upon the fossils by chance during a more general database search.  
By studying hair from a wallaby, scientists in Buffalo discovered Ebola and other filoviruses were tens of millions of years old. How the finding may show us how to defend against them.
“It was a fortuitous discovery,” Bruenn told The Daily Beast last week. “I was looking for all viral genomes, and that's what I found.”
The mammal profiles in the genetic databases included the wallaby, and the scientists decided to verify their finding by looking directly at the animal's DNA. They asked the director of the Buffalo Zoo for some wallaby hair.
“We didn't want to hurt the wallaby,” Bruenn says. “They shed hair.”
The zoo is blessed with multiple wallabies and was happy to oblige. The scientists were able to extract sufficient DNA from the roots, and they did indeed find the virus fossils. They got the same result from the campus bat.
One remaining question was how those fossils got there when these particular viruses had been presumed to lack the capacity to insinuate themselves into an animal's genetic makeup.
One possible answer was that the animal integrated fragments of the virus into its genes as a result of persistent infection.
This, in turn, raised the possibility that in the course of continued evolution, the mammals had incorporated the fossil as a genetic defense against the viruses—a kind of vaccine generated by natural selection.
And that could now help us in developing our own defenses against a virus for which there is presently no proven treatment.