Biologists examined teeth and bone fragments from 500 individual Upper Neolithic and early Bronze Age burials from different regions of the world. DNA analysis from six samples yielded the complete genome of the plague bacillus (Yersinia pestis); the oldest of them have lain in the earth for 4800 years, and they correspond to the Altai burials. Reported by Naked Science.
The remains of people, in whose bones traces of the plague stick were found, were found on the territory of modern Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Croatia and Estonia. Samples from Russia and Estonia date from earlier periods than the rest; moreover, they serve as perhaps the most ancient evidence of human disease with the plague. Their dating roughly coincides with the dating of the DNA of the plague bacillus, extracted from human remains found in Altai, explained Alexander Gerbig, a historian from the Historical Institute of the Max Planck Society.
One of the six strains of the bacterium turned out to be older than the other five - it is identical to the strain recovered from a Siberian burial made 4800-4600 years ago. At this time, people who lived on the territory of modern Russia and Ukraine began to migrate to the west, to Europe. Perhaps it was these settlers who brought the plague to Eastern Europe.
Comparing the Bronze Age bacteria decoded by the genome of the Neolithic plague bacillus, scientists came to the conclusion that both in the Stone Age and later people were infected with the same closely related bacterial strains. This suggests that, despite the large distances between the habitats of the Stone Age people, they became infected from each other. “Two scenarios are possible: either people in Europe were infected with the plague, falling into the same habitat of the bacterium, or the bacterium came to the Old World once and remained there,” one of the authors of the study, Aida Andrares Valthuena, theorizes.
Note that in our times the Altai Republic remains one of the few plague foci in Russia. So, in 2016, a 10-year-old boy contracted the bubonic form of the plague, he is a marmot, which are the main carriers of the disease. Then all the people who came into contact with the sick boy were placed under the control of doctors, the residents of the village were urgently vaccinated against this deadly disease. The patient eventually recovered.
