Plague is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, and scientists believe they may have found patient zero – but it’s much older than most people think. , according to a new study.
Yersinia pestis is the bacterium widely believed to have been the source of the plague that ravaged the world in the Middle Ages and possibly wiped out 50% of all of Europe in what has come to be known as the plague black. The disease was spread by fleas on rats, which began to spread further to Europe from Asia due to trade routes.
But while the disease was first known in the Middle Ages, and scientists believed it may have appeared around 2,000 years ago, recent findings suggest the disease may be much older than it is. believed so before.
As detailed in a new study, published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Cell reports, a 5,000-year-old child Yersinia pestis The genome has been reconstructed by scientists from the bones of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer found (nicknamed RV 2039) buried in Latvia.
According to the researchers, it was probably one of, if not the first known strain of what would become the plague.
The hunter-gatherer was likely bitten by a rodent and died of shock from an infection, the researchers theorize.
It should be noted that despite the consensus that has prevailed for years that the plague originated in Asia, scientists have started to find evidence of a European origin. In 2018, a study published in the academic journal Cell found an ancient case of plague in a 4,900-year-old grave in Sweden.
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In a 2015 study in the same journal, scientists presented evidence that Yersinia pestis infected humans in Bronze Age Eurasia.
However, it is widely accepted that these earlier variants were not as infectious, and in particular the genome did not have the necessary factor that would allow it to be transmissible from fleas to humans. Another 2018 study in Cell found that two individuals in Russia 3,800 years ago were infected with the more virulent version, as did an individual from Iron Age Armenia 2,900 years ago.
In the 2018 study, researchers hypothesized that an early plague pandemic contributed to the decline of Neolithic populations in Europe.
However, a few elements emerge from this latest study. More particularly, the strain is different in that it marks the beginning of the evolution of Yersinia pestis, and is found on a separate branch from that found in Sweden. It further adds to other early Yersinia pestis genomes found in Eastern Europe. Additionally, researchers have reason to suspect that although the genome was found in 5,000-year-old bones, this strain of Yersinia pestis may have evolved about 7,000 years ago. This would place him not at the end of the Neolithic period as earlier theories suggested, but at the beginning.
The plague has spread across Europe and wiped out around a third of the world’s population. Although now treatable with antibiotics, the disease remains a persistent threat in some parts of the world, and occasional outbreaks still occur, but it has mostly been found in animals. Most human cases have been observed in Africa.
However, humans can still catch the disease, either by being bitten by a flea carrying Yersina pestis or by delivering an animal infected with the disease.
