Ancient Siberian graves discovered by scientists have revealed the oldest traces of one in all humanity’s deadliest diseases: the plague, difficult established beliefs about its origins.
Examinations — published within the journal Nature on Wednesday — on skeletons of hunter-gatherers who lived some 5,500 years ago within the Lake Baikal region of Siberia revealed DNA traces of the bacteria that cause the plague.
The plague has led to several devastating pandemics over centuries, most famously the “Black Death,” which killed greater than 25 million people across Europe within the mid-1300s.
The invention suggests that the infectious disease — which scientists had thought began as a gentle illness — posed a lethal threat to humanity far earlier than was previously believed.
“The findings fundamentally change how we expect in regards to the origins and early impact of 1 of humanity’s most consequential pathogens,” evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, and senior creator of the study, told Reuters.
Get breaking National news
Get breaking Canada news delivered to your inbox because it happens so you will not miss a trending story.
“It doesn’t fit the model,” Willerslev also told the Recent York Times, “But now we have to just accept the information.”
The researchers said the outbreak was particularly deadly for young people, judging from the burial sites that included children, and attributed this to genetic traits in these strains which can be now not present in today’s iteration of the pathogen.
At Lake Baikal, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague, was detected in 18 of 46 bodies examined, the next rate than in some medieval plague burial pits. University of Oxford evolutionary geneticist and study lead creator Ruairidh Macleod said finding evidence of a large-scale lethal plague outbreak amongst these hunter-gatherers was a “complete surprise.”
He also noted that the traditional strains lacked a gene required for efficient flea-borne transmission but possessed a genetic variant absent in later plague strains that may cause severe inflammatory complications to which children are especially vulnerable. Lots of those buried were children, sometimes siblings.
In response to a 2020 study published within the National Library of Medicine, the plague has killed 200 million people in all of human history, with experts having chronicled enormous pandemics dating back to the Roman Empire. Its rise was seemingly tied to the emergence of farming and cities, where animals, food and humans would interact in close proximity, but novel findings suggest this was not necessarily the case, given emerging data on its impact on “prehistoric individuals across Europe.”
There have been also thoughts that early strains could have been mild, but the invention that the plague killed prehistoric hunter-gatherers traversing a distant forested landscape in small bands contradicts those notions.
Experts also said the invention adds to evidence that marmots were the bacterium’s original host species, and that the plague arose in central or northeastern Asia before spreading across Eurasia.
The disease, which has several common strains, including the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic types, now mostly lives in rodents. Nonetheless, it’s fleas that pick up the bacterium and spread it to other animals, including humans.
On the planet today, a number of hundred people contract the disease every year, though it’s curable with antibiotics, the Mayo Clinic says.
— with files from Reuters
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.