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Bronze Age humans, world’s earliest plague victims: Study

Sunday, 25 October 2015 2:46 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 25 October 2015 2:46 PM ]

Scientists have found early strains of the Black Death bacterium, Yersinia pestis, on Bronze Age skulls from Central Asia. (File photo)

Scientists say the germ that caused the so-called Black Death in the 14th century afflicted human beings more than 3,000 years earlier than previously thought.

A new study showed that humans suffered from the infection caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis as long ago as about 2800 BCE.

“It seems to have started impacting human populations over large geographical scales way earlier than we thought,” said geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge.

Scientists studied the DNA of 101 human remains from Russia, Poland, Estonia and Armenia. They found evidence of Yersinia pestis infection in seven of them.

The study showed that the plague was widespread across Europe and Asia during the Bronze Age. The oldest evidence of infection was found in people buried in a mass grave in the Altai Mountains between 2782 and 2794 BCE.

“The Bronze Age plague represents an intermediate state where it had not yet evolved the capabilities to be transmitted by fleas or cause bubonic plague. However, it was still able to cause septicemic and pneumonic plague,” explained Simon Rasmussen of the Technical University of Denmark.

Yersinia pestis was responsible for two of the deadliest pandemics in human history, namely the 6th-century Justinian Plague, named after the Byzantine emperor who was sickened but survived, and the 14th-century Black Death.

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