New evidence on origins of black deaths say experts ‘totally surprised’ – National
Ancient Siberian tombs discovered by scientists have revealed the oldest traces of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases: the plague, challenging strong beliefs about its origins.
Tests – published in the journal Nature on Wednesday – on the bones of hunter-gatherers who lived about 5,500 years ago in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia revealed traces of the DNA of the bacteria that cause the disease.
The plague led to many devastating plagues over the centuries, most famously the “Black Death,” which killed more than 25 million people across Europe in the mid-1300s.
The discovery suggests that an infectious disease – which scientists thought started as a minor illness – became a deadly threat to humanity much sooner than previously thought.
“The findings fundamentally change the way we think about the origin and early impact of the most important virus on humanity,” evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, and the study’s lead author, told Reuters.
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“It doesn’t fit the model,” Willerslev also told the New York Times, “But we have to accept the data.”
Researchers say that this disease is more dangerous for young people, if we look at burial places that include children, they say that this is due to genetics in these problems that are no longer found in today’s multiplication of viruses.
In Lake Baikal, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague, was found in 18 of the 46 corpses examined, a higher rate than in some burial pits plagued by the Middle Ages. University of Oxford evolutionist and lead author of the study Ruairidh Macleod said finding evidence of an outbreak of a deadly disease among these hunter-gatherers was “an absolute miracle.”
He also noted that the ancient strains lacked the gene needed to transmit fleas effectively but had a gene that is absent in recent strains of the plague that can cause severe inflammatory problems that children are most vulnerable to. Many of those buried were children, sometimes siblings.
According to a 2020 study published in the National Library of Medicine, the disease has killed 200 million people throughout human history, and experts have documented epidemics dating back to the Roman Empire. Its growth seemed to be related to the emergence of agriculture and cities, where animals, food and people would work closely together, but the discoveries in the novels suggest that this was not the case, given the emerging information about its impact on “prehistoric people throughout Europe.”
There were also thoughts that the early species might have been milder, but the discovery that the disease killed off prehistoric hunters who traveled through remote forested areas in small groups contradicts those ideas.
Experts also say the discovery adds to the evidence that marmots were the first species of the bacterium, and that the disease originated in central or northeastern Asia before spreading across Eurasia.
This disease, which has several common types, including bubonicpneumoniaand the septicemic species, now mostly living in rats. However, fleas pick up the virus and spread it to other animals, including humans.
In the world today, a few hundred people get this disease each year, even though it is treatable with antibiotics, says the Mayo Clinic.
– via files from Reuters
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