The first cities of Europe and the beginnings of European civilization could have been destroyed about 5.5 thousand years ago with the first version of the plague stick, carried by merchants and raiders. Scientists who "resurrected" this microbe and published their findings in the journal Cell write about this.
“We have solved this historical puzzle. The first large settlements appear in Europe about six thousand years ago, and after a few centuries they all disappear abruptly. As it turned out, around the same time, a “modern” plague appeared, spreading “on wheels” by the first merchants of that time,”says Simon Rasmussen from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).
Gravedigger of civilizations
Humanity has experienced several large-scale epidemics with similar symptoms, which are described as "plague". The first of these was the so-called Plague of Justinian, which broke out in Byzantium and the Mediterranean in the middle of the 6th century and claimed the lives of over 100 million people. Another similar episode was the medieval Black Death, which killed about a third of Europeans in the mid-14th century.
In the past few years, geneticists have been able to extract the remains of the DNA of these bacteria from the bones of their victims and prove that they were all caused by different, but similar strains of the same bacterium - Yersinia pestis. As geneticists have recently found out, the plague accompanied the evolution of mankind throughout the entire time of its settlement in Europe and Asia in the last ten thousand years, periodically disappearing and reappearing.
Such discoveries made scientists wonder how exactly the plague spread across the Old World, where its "homeland" is, whether rats were its only carriers, and how often and where new outbreaks of this disease appeared. Some of the answers to these questions have already been received thanks to finds in the modern Samara region and Tatarstan.
Rasmussen and his colleagues revealed the history of the first steps of the "black death" in Europe, studying the remains of ancient people who lived in the first cities of the subcontinent. The largest of them were built about six thousand years ago in the so-called "Tripoli", between the Danube and the Dnieper rivers, at the junction of modern Moldova, Ukraine and Romania.
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“These mega-settlements were dozens of times larger than any other group of people at the time. Their inhabitants lived in very cramped conditions, next to animals, food and sewage in conditions of total unsanitary conditions. This is exactly what is needed for the emergence of plague and other new diseases,”the scientist continues.
Historians, as Rasmussen notes, have long been interested in why all these "megacities" of the Stone Age, in which 10-20 thousand people lived, were almost simultaneously abandoned and forgotten only 300-500 years after their foundation.
Paleogenetics found the answer to this riddle in a mass grave of ancient Scandinavians, contemporaries of the Trypillian culture, who lived in a large village in the vicinity of the modern Swedish city of Falköping about 5100 years ago.
Collapse genetics
The teeth of one of these deceased, which belonged to a 20-year-old girl, contained scraps of plague bacillus DNA. This automatically made it the oldest specimen of plague to date, which immediately attracted the attention of scientists. Later, they found traces of the plague in other bones from this burial ground.
Having reconstructed the bacterial genome, Rasmussen and his colleagues compared it with the DNA of modern Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the "black death" and other ancient microbes. It turned out that the Swedish plague bacillus was a close relative of the ancestor of all these versions of the disease, which makes it the actual "foremother" of all subsequent epidemics.
On the other hand, it possessed many new mutations that were not characteristic of the supposed "ancestor of the plague" from Samara and other ancient versions of this microbe that existed at about the same time.
One of the oldest victims of the plague, whose remains were found in Sweden.
This, as the scientist notes, is extremely important and interesting from the point of view of the history of the evolution of the plague - the simultaneous close relationship and a large number of mutations means that the microbe actively spread between different populations of its victims and evolved rapidly.
According to Rasmussen and his colleagues, at that time there were several versions of the plague, affecting different settlements of the ancient Trypillians and other peoples of Europe. Their ancestors, as shown by DNA analysis of the plague from Sweden, split about 5,700 years ago.
The time of their appearance, according to him, is not at all accidental. Its coincidence with the time of the disappearance of large cities in Tripoli suggests that the plague arose in large settlements of people, and was not simply brought from Asia along with the first Indo-European tribes that conquered Europe at the end of the Stone Age.
Since at this time large "migrations of peoples" did not occur, its carriers, according to Rasmussen, were traders and various paramilitary groups that possessed carts and were able to transport large stocks of goods or looted loot to new "markets".
Such a scenario, as the geneticist explains, allows several historical mysteries to be solved at once, in addition to the disappearance of these cities. For example, the appearance of the plague and its spread in large settlements of the first peoples of Europe explains why these peoples disappeared without a trace, leaving no trace in the DNA of the modern inhabitants of the subcontinent.
The discovery of other samples of the "fossil" plague bacillus, scientists hope, will help reveal the migration routes of the plague and find out how it moved towards Asia and why the next epidemics of the "black death" originated in the East, and not in the western countries of Eurasia.
