5,000-year-old Hunter-gatherer is Earliest Person to Die With the Plague
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5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer is earliest person to die with the plague:
A hunter-gatherer who lived more than 5,000 years ago is the earliest known person to have died with the plague, researchers have revealed.
Stone-age communities in western Europe experienced a huge population decline about 5,500 years ago, an event that is thought to have subsequently enabled a huge migration of people from the east.
The plague has been posited as an explanation after it was previously been found in stone-age individuals, including a 20-year-old woman from a rural farming community in Sweden.
However, researchers claim their new discovery casts doubt on the idea suggesting the nature of the strain found in hunter-gatherer would have been unlikely to cause rapid spread.
"We think that these early forms of Y.pestis couldn't really drive big outbreaks," said Prof Ben Krause-Kyora, co-author of the study at the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany.
Writing in the journal Cell Reports, Krause-Kyora and colleagues describe how they analysed ancient DNA recovered from the teeth and skull bones of four individuals buried in a prehistoric rubbish tip, or shell midden, at a site in Latvia called Riukalns.
The remains, dating to between 5,300-5,050 years ago, were from a young woman, a baby and two men, and were unearthed in two excavations, one in the 19th century and one just a few years ago.
The team screened the genetic material for signs of known pathogens, including Y. pestis - the bacterium that causes the plague, revealing one of the men, aged 20 to 30 years old, not only had DNA fragments, but also proteins, indicating he had died with a now-extinct form of the plague in his bloodstream.
"Up to date [it is], the oldest known plague victim," said Krause-Kyora.
Journal Reference:
Julian Susat, Harald Lubke. A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis, Cell Reports (DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109278)
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