New discovery: 4.000-year-old evidence of plague found in Britain

Photo: Profimedia/Wikimedia

Scientists have identified several cases of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, one of the deadliest diseases in history. This evidence was found on human skeletons from a mass grave in Somerset and on a skeleton from a circular funerary monument in Cambria, writes The BBC.

The team of researchers in their new study write that they managed to take samples from the skeletons of 34 people, in whose teeth they looked for the presence of the bacterium "Yersinia pestis". They examined the dental pulp, because that is where the DNA of infectious diseases is mostly trapped.

Scientists from The Francis Crick Institute for this research, collaborated with "The University of Oxford" The Levens Local History Group, The Museum of Wales, where the new results were obtained.

"The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples thousands of years old is amazing. These genomes can inform us about the spread and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and we hope they will help us understand which genes may be important for the spread of infectious diseases," said Pooja Swali, study author and PhD student at the Institute.

Scientists have identified the bacterium "Yersinia pestis" in the skeletons of two children, believed to be aged between 10 and 12, and a woman between the ages of 35 and 45. According to the findings, most likely the three people lived at approximately the same time.

They believe that this type of late Neolithic and Bronze Age plague was likely brought to Central and Western Europe around 4.800 BC by humans who spread into Eurasia. But this research suggests that the plague spread as far as Britain.

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