Ancient Siberian tombs discovered by scientists have revealed the oldest traces of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases: the plague, challenging established beliefs about its origins.
Exams: published in the magazine. Nature On Wednesday, traces of DNA from the bacteria that causes plague were found in the skeletons of hunter-gatherers who lived about 5,500 years ago in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia.
The plague has caused several devastating pandemics over the centuries, most famously the “Black Death,” which killed more than 25 million people across Europe in the mid-13th century.
The discovery suggests that the infectious disease, which scientists thought began as a mild illness, posed a lethal threat to humanity much earlier than previously believed.
“The findings fundamentally change the way we think about the origins and early impact of one of humanity’s most important pathogens,” evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, and lead author of the study, told Reuters.
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“It doesn’t fit the model,” Willerslev also told the New York Times, “But we have to accept the data.”
Researchers said the outbreak was particularly deadly for young people, judging by burial sites that included children, and attributed it to genetic traits in these strains that are no longer found in the current version of the pathogen.
In Lake Baikal, the plague-causing bacteria Yersinia pestis was detected in 18 of 46 bodies examined, a higher rate than in some medieval plague pits. Ruairidh Macleod, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, said finding evidence of a large-scale deadly plague outbreak among these “hunter-gatherers” was a “complete surprise.”
He also noted that the ancient strains lacked a gene necessary for efficient transmission through fleas, but possessed a genetic variant absent in later plague strains that can cause serious inflammatory complications to which children are especially vulnerable. Many of those buried were children, sometimes brothers.
According to a 2020 study published in the National Library of MedicineThe plague has killed 200 million people in human history, and experts have recorded huge pandemics dating back to the Roman Empire. Its rise was apparently linked to the rise of agriculture and cities, where animals, food and humans would interact in close proximity, but novel findings suggest this was not necessarily the case, given emerging data on its impact on “prehistoric individuals across Europe.”
It was also thought that early strains may have been mild, but the discovery that the plague killed prehistoric hunter-gatherers who traversed a remote forest landscape in small bands contradicts those notions.
Experts also said the discovery adds to evidence that marmots were the bacteria’s original host species and that the plague emerged in central or northeastern Asia before spreading across Eurasia.
The disease, which has several common strains, including bubonicpneumonicand septicemic types, now live more commonly in rodents. However, it is fleas that contract the bacteria and transmit it to other animals, including humans.
In today’s world, a few hundred people contract the disease each year, although it is curable with antibiotics, Mayo Clinic says.
– with Reuters archives
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