Probably, many have heard about the terrible plague epidemics that raged in the Middle Ages. However, it seems that they began much earlier: DNA analysis of extinct strains of the plague bacillus showed that people could become victims of this disease as early as the IV-V millennium BC. The research article was published in the journal Cell.
The causative agent of the plague - the so-called plague stick (Yersinia pestis in Latin) - was discovered in June 1894 by the Frenchman Alexander Yersen and the Japanese Kitasato Shibasaburo.
Justinian's plague
As it turned out, in the middle of the 6th century, during the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian, Byzantium and the Mediterranean were seized by a pandemic of the disease that claimed the lives of more than 100 million people. "Justinian's plague" (551-580) began in Egypt. The symptoms of the deadly disease were remarkably similar to those observed in the victims of the "black death", which later, in the middle of the 14th century, wiped out about a third of the population of all of Europe.
The first outbreak of the bubonic plague occurred between 1347 and 1353. It was carried mainly by fleas that bit people. It is believed that the plague came from Eastern China, from where it was brought to the Crimea in 1346.
From the Crimea, the disease went "for a walk" in Europe … By 1348 it had destroyed almost 15 million people, which was a quarter of the then European population. By 1351 Poland and Russia were plagued by plague. By 1352, 25 million people had died from it. Some researchers even call the figure 34 million …
In England, the so-called Great Plague (1665-1666), during which about 100,000 people died, was better remembered. This accounted for 20 percent of the entire population of London. In 17203-1722, an epidemic of the bubonic plague swept the French city of Marseille and several cities in Provence. It also killed 100 thousand people.
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In Russia, outbreaks of plague were observed in 1603, 1654, 1738-1740 and 1769-1772. In 17713-1772, 56,907 Muscovites died from a plague epidemic, which was marked by the Plague Riot.
At the end of the 19th century, another plague pandemic happened in Central and South China, especially frequent outbreaks were observed in Hong Kong and Bombay. From there, it began to spread throughout Asia. India alone killed 6 million people. By the way, outbreaks of plague were recorded there in the 20th century. In the period from 1898 to 1963, 12,662.1 thousand Indians died from the plague.
The last major outbreak of plague on the globe was the 1910-1911 epidemic in Manchuria. According to various sources, from 60 to 100 thousand people died from it.
Plague carriers in ancient times were the people themselves
In 2011, Eske Villerslev from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and his colleagues managed to restore the Yersinia pestis genome and confirm that the so-called "Plague of Justinian" was caused by almost the same microbe as the medieval "black death", only belonging to a different, long ago extinct species.
Having studied fragments of DNA of teeth and bones from the remains of people of the Bronze Age, who inhabited the territory of Europe and the Mediterranean, scientists discovered traces of Yersinia pestis. Since the age of the oldest remains, in which the plague stick was found, is 5783 years, it turns out that people began to die of the plague more than seven thousand years ago.
“We found that the first lines of Yersinia pestis appeared much earlier and were much more common than we previously thought, and we were able to narrow down estimates of when and how this causative agent of the medieval 'black death' appeared,” commented Villerslev.
True, the ancient plague bacilli were somewhat different from the "black death" and "plague of Justinian" bacilli - they lacked the pla and ymt genes associated with the spread of the disease.
Consequently, then the plague did not spread through fleas, as in later times, but somehow differently. In addition, in the days of Ancient Egypt, the infection could be transmitted by airborne droplets, and the patients did not have the characteristic buboes - an increase in lymph nodes on the arms and legs.
In all likelihood, the people themselves were the carriers of the plague in ancient times, the researchers believe. After all, the IV-V millennia BC were marked by waves of mass migration that affected tens of thousands of the world's inhabitants. As a result of the great "migration of peoples", Yersinia pestis could have spread throughout Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa.
Bubonic plague BC
At the same time, a sample of the plague bacillus found on the territory of modern Armenia, in the remains of a person who died in 951 BC, already contains the pla and ymt genes. Since the symptoms of the bubonic plague are consistent with the descriptions of the mysterious disease that, according to the Bible, struck the Philistines in 1320 BC, then, most likely, her homeland was the densely populated Middle East, from where she had already "rolled" to Europe.
Consequently, the first strains of the plague, which we know as "bubonic", appeared between the 1st and 2nd millennia BC, that is, this terrible disease is much "older" than is commonly believed.