Discover the mystery of a disease that killed tens of millions of people 8 centuries ago from a 5,000-year-old man

"The most surprising thing is that we can predict the emergence of Yersinia pestis 2000 years earlier than previously published studies have shown," said senior author Ben Klaus-Kay, director of the aDNA laboratory at the University of Kiel, Germany.

The hunter-gatherer carrying the plague was a 20 to 30-year-old man named "RV 2039"

Krause-Kyora and his team used tooth and bone samples from all four hunter-gatherers, sequenced their genomes, and then tested them for bacterial and viral pathogens

"It is surprising that we have seen a more or less complete gene set of Yersinia pestis in this early strain, and only a few genes are lacking

In particular, this ancient strain lacks one key thing: the gene that originally allowed fleas to act as a vector for the transmission of plague

Starting from RV 2039, Yersinia pestis may have taken more than a thousand years to acquire all the mutations needed for flea transmission

Yersinia pestis was found in his blood, which means that he is likely to die from a bacterial infection-although researchers believe that the course of the disease may be quite slow

On the contrary, this 5,000-year-old strain was probably transmitted directly through the bite of an infected rodent, and it may not have spread outside the infected person

These conclusions—the early form of Yersinia pestis may be a slow-spreading disease and not very contagious—challenged many theories about the development of human civilization in Europe and Asia

This timeline, coupled with the weaker and less lethal characteristics of this early plague strain, also contradicts the hypothesis that the plague caused a massive decline in the population of Western Europe at the end of the Neolithic period

The authors say that studying the history of Yersinia pestis may also help reveal the history of the human genome

Journal Reference :

1. Julian Susat, Harald Lübke, Alexander Immel, Ute Brinker, Aija Macāne, John Meadows, Britta Steer, Andreas Tholey, Ilga Zagorska, Guntis Gerhards, Ulrich Schmölcke, Mārcis Kalniņš, Andrecis Kalniņš, Andrena, Frankebara, Elīordina Teßman, Mari Tõrv, Stefan Schreiber, Christian Andree, Valdis Bērziņš, Almut Nebel, Ben Krause-Kyora.