Ancient plague mystery cracked after DNA found in 4,000-year-old animal remains

Long before the Black Death killed millions across Europe in the Middle Ages, an earlier, more elusive versionof the plaguespread across much of Eurasia.

For years, scientists were unsure how the ancient disease managed to spread so widely during the Bronze Age, which lasted from roughly 3300 to 1200 B.C., and stick around for nearly 2,000 years, especially since it wasn’t spread by fleas like later plagues.Now, researchers say a surprising clue may help explain it, a domesticated sheep that lived more than 4,000 years ago.

Researchers found DNA from the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in the tooth of a Bronze Age sheep discovered in what is now southern Russia, according to a study recently published in thejournal Cell.It is the first known evidence that the ancient plague infected animals, not just people, and offers a missing clue about how the disease spread.

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“It was alarm bells for my team,” study co-author Taylor Hermes, a University of Arkansas archaeologist who studies ancient livestock and disease spread, saidin a statement.“This was the first time we had recovered the genome from Yersinia pestis in a non-human sample.”

A domesticated sheep, likely similar to this one, lived alongside humans during the Bronze Age.(iStock)

And it was a lucky discovery, according to the researchers.

“When we testlivestock DNAin ancient samples, we get a complex genetic soup of contamination,” Hermes said.“This is a large barrier … but it also gives us an opportunity to look for pathogens that infected herds and their handlers.”

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The highly technical and time-consuming work requires researchers to separate tiny, damaged fragments of ancient DNA from contamination left by soil, microbes and even modern humans.The DNA they recover from ancient animals is often broken into tiny pieces sometimes just 50 “letters” long, compared to a full human DNA strand, which contains more than 3 billion of those letters.

Animal remains are especially tough to study because they are often poorly preserved compared to human remains that were carefully buried, the researchers noted.

animals and humans.

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When the plague returned in the Middle Ages during the 1300s, known as the Black Death, it killed an estimated one-third of Europe’s population.

The discovery was made at Arkaim, a fortified Bronze Age settlement in the Southern Ural Mountains of present-day Russia near the Kazakhstan border.(iStock)

“It had to be more than people moving,” Hermes said.“Our plague sheep gave us a breakthrough.We now see it as a dynamic between people, livestock and some still unidentified ‘natural reservoir’ for it.”

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The researchers plan to study more ancient human and animal remains fromthe regionto determine how widespread the plague was and which species may have played a role in spreading it. 

Researchers (not pictured) found plague-causing Yersinia pestis DNA in the remains of a Bronze Age sheep.(iStock)

They also hope to identify the wild animal that originally carried the bacteria and better understand how human movement and livestock herding helped the disease travel across vast distances, insights that could help them better anticipate howanimal-borne diseasescontinue to emerge.

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The research was led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, with senior authors Felix M.Key of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and Christina Warinner of Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology.

The research was supported by the Max Planck Society, which has also funded follow-up work in the region.