Plague was killing entire families thousands of years before the Black Death
Researchers have discovered that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis was causing lethal outbreaks in hunter-gatherer communities 5,500 years ago. This finding challenges the long-held belief that the disease only became a major threat after the rise of crowded, urbanized farming societies.
Why it matters
Understanding the evolutionary history and virulence of ancient pathogens helps scientists better predict and prepare for future disease outbreaks.
Plague is often linked to rats, packed medieval cities, and the devastating epidemics that tore through Europe during and after the Middle Ages.
But new research published in Nature suggests the disease was already a deadly threat 5,500 years ago. At that time, it was killing people in small, mobile hunter-gatherer groups - long before farming and urban life created the crowded conditions usually associated with major plague outbreaks.
An international research team studied ancient DNA recovered from human remains at four hunter-gatherer burial sites in the Lake Baikal region of East Siberia. By sequencing genetic material preserved in teeth, the scientists were able to reconstruct ancient bacterial genomes and identify previously unknown early forms of plague.
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