Plague was killing entire families thousands of years before the Black Death

Ancient DNA reveals that plague was already killing hunter-gatherers in Siberia 5,500 years ago, long before cities and flea-driven epidemics. The prehistoric strains may have been especially dangerous because they carried a genetic factor capable of provoking severe immune reactions. Plague was killing entire families thousands of years before the Black Death.

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. Ancient DNA Reveals Early Plague 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. "Whether the earliest forms of plague were mild or virulent has been a matter of debate, but our findings demonstrate that these ancient strains were already highly lethal," says senior author Eske Willerslev, Professor at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge. To understand what happened within these prehistoric communities, the researchers combined genetic evidence with archaeology and radiocarbon dating.