Ancient strain of ‘extremely virulent’ PLAGUE found – and could have killed off our early ancestors
The deadly plague spread among ancient European settlements via traders travelling from camp to camp
SCIENTISTS have unearthed an ancient strain of plague that may have had a hand in wiping out some of our early ancestors.
A young woman who died 5,000 years ago was struck down by a previously unknown form of the disease, which has killed around 500 million people across its 12,000-year history.
The plague likely spread among ancient European settlements via traders travelling from camp to camp, scientists said.
Its deadly advance across the continent may have contributed to the decline of these settlements seen at the start of the early Bronze Age around 3000 BC.
"Plague is maybe one of the deadliest bacteria that has ever existed for humans," said study author Dr Simon Rasmussen, of the University of Copenhagen.
"The kind of analyses we do here let us go back through time and look at how this pathogen that's had such a huge effect on us evolved."
Researchers analysed the remains of a 20-year-old woman who lived in Sweden during the Neolithic period - a time when humans first began to use farming practices.
It is believed that Europe was home to roughly seven million people during the Neolithic era.
Scans of the woman's DNA revealed a newly discovered strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the plague.
The strain had the same genes that make the pneumonic plague deadly today, and traces of it were also found in another skeleton at the same grave site - suggesting the disease likely killed the young woman.
It is the oldest strain of plague ever discovered, and the closest scientists have gotten to the original virus, from which all other forms of the disease have sprung over its 12,000-year history.
Researchers said the new strain may have played a hand in the collapse of Neolithic 'mega-settlements', ancient European communities that boasted up to 20,000 inhabitants.
The settlements, which all but disappeared around 5,000 years ago, would have been the perfecting breeding ground for new strains of plague.
"These mega-settlements were the largest settlements in Europe at that time, ten times bigger than anything else," Dr Rasmussen said.
"They had people, animals, and stored food close together, and, likely, very poor sanitation. That's the textbook example of what you need to evolve new pathogens.
A brief history of the plague
Here are the key facts...
- Plague has a remarkable place in history and has had enormous effects on the development of modern civilisation.
- Some scholars have even suggested that the collapse of the Roman Empire may be linked to the spread of plague by Roman soldiers returning home from battle in the Persian Gulf in 165 AD.
- For centuries, plague represented disaster for people living in Asia, Africa and Europe and because the cause of plague was unknown, plague outbreaks contributed to massive panic in cities and countries where it appeared.
- Numerous references in art, literature and monuments attest to the horrors and devastation of past plague epidemics.
- We now know that plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis that often infects small rodents (like rats, mice, and squirrels) and is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected flea.
- In the past, black rats were the most commonly infected animals and hungry rat fleas would jump from their recently-dead rat hosts to humans, looking for a blood meal.
- Pneumonic plague, a particular form of plague infection, is instead transmitted through infected droplets in a sick person’s cough.
- Together, the Pneumonic and Bubonic plague (black death) killed an estimated 200 million people in the 14th Century
(Source: US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention)
"If plague evolved in the mega-settlements, then when people started dying from it, the settlements would have been abandoned and destroyed. This is exactly what was observed in these settlements 5,500 years ago."
Traders hopping between settlements likely brought the disease to the small community where the Swedish woman lived, he added.
While plague is often seen as a disease of the Middle Ages, strains of the bacterium that cause it still infect humans today.
The illness has a history spanning 12,000 years, but the most famous strains are the bubonic and pneumonic plagues of the 14th Century, which together killed an estimated 200 million people across Europe and Asia.
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It is thought that the disease killed off 90% of Neolithic Britons in the space of just 300 years around 2500 BC.
Plague is transmitted via pests like fleas and causes abdominal pain, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting.
In its worst cases, the infection causes the skin to go gangrenous, eventually turning black and falling off.
Today, around 1,000 to 2,000 cases are reported worldwide each year, with the highest incidence in Africa.
Do you think scientists should be digging through ancient plague DNA?
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