PARIS, France: The plague was causing deadly outbreaks among communities of hunter-gatherers in Siberia around 5,500 years ago, according to a study on Wednesday that sheds light on how humans could have first caught this scourge.
The plague is generally associated with rats spreading the disease through crowded medieval cities, sparking pandemics such as the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people across Europe from the 1300s to 1800s.
This was a long way from the rugged vistas surrounding Lake Baikal in the Russian region of Siberia, where archaeologists have spent decades studying the burial sites of pre-historic hunter-gatherers. One of these sites has been particularly mystifying because of its “very unusual mortality profile” -- many children and adolescents appear to have died over a short period, Oxford University researcher Ruairidh Macleod told journalists.
The skeletons also bore no signs of violence or trauma, meaning there was “no reasonable explanation” for this catastrophic event, said the lead author of the new study in the journal Nature.
When the team of researchers sequenced ancient DNA from 46 people across four sites near the lake, they found Yersinia pestis -- the bacteria responsible for the plague -- in 18 of them.
