Unearthed Siberian Skeletons Rewrite History with Oldest Known Bubonic Plague Cases—What Secrets Do They Hold?
These recent findings push back against previous research concerning how the plague spread in ancient times, particularly in terms of human-to-human transmission and prevalence in hunter-gatherer societies.
Before this study came out, researchers assumed that plague outbreaks only occurred in high-density areas or settlements, as opposed to small, nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.
“Hunter-gatherers are constantly moving around the landscape. The theory is that infectious disease can’t really take hold and devastate entire communities in this way. Typically, if somebody gets ill, they’ll move somewhere else. The fact that we’re finding this happening in an isolated group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers challenges that epidemiological theory,” Macleod said at a news conference, according to CNN.
Vladimiri Bazaliiskii/Baikal Archaeology ProjectThough history’s most infamous outbreak of the bubonic plague is the Black Death that killed half of Europe in just seven years during the mid-14th century, this lethal infection has actually been with humankind since before the dawn of recorded history.
Additionally, in previous research, older strains of the plague seemed to lack the characteristics that allowed them to spread, indicating to scientists that these early plagues rarely caused outbreaks. This older research left scientists unclear on the prehistoric origins of the plague and how it was transmitted before fleas and livestock became some of the primary vectors.
Now, with the evidence of this small prehistoric outbreak in hand, researchers are questioning these previously-held notions of how the plague spread in ancient societies.
“Previous research has only found what seem to be sporadic, relatively isolated infections of the earliest versions of Y. pestis with no compelling evidence of human-to-human transmission chains, but the datasets may have simply been too incomplete to assess this as a possibility. This study changes that,” Ian Light-Maka, a postdoctoral associate at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, told CNN.
While this research is groundbreaking and likely suggests that there was prehistoric human-to-human transmission of the bubonic plague, more studies need to be done at comparable sites before we can completely rewrite the early history of humanity’s most infamous infection.
After reading about the earliest-known cases of the bubonic plague, learn about the Antonine Plague that killed 5 million ancient Romans. Then, discover how researchers found eight new populations of ancient hunter-gatherers in Europe.
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