Story at a glance
- The remains of the ancient man, dubbed RV 2039, were excavated in the late 1800s in Latvia.
- Researchers from the University of Kiel in Germany used teeth and bone samples to sequence the hunter-gatherer’s genomes and test them for bacterial and viral pathogens.
- That’s when they found evidence of Yersinia pestis in RV 2039, marking the oldest known strain of the bacteria ever discovered.
Researchers say they’ve found the oldest strain of bacteria behind the Bubonic plague that killed millions of people in Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s.
A study published in the journal Cell Reports details the discovery of the bacteria called Yersinia pestis in the remains of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer.
Credit: Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin
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Researchers from the University of Kiel in Germany used teeth and bone samples to sequence the hunter-gatherer’s genomes and test them for bacterial and viral pathogens.
That’s when they found evidence of Yersinia pestis in RV 2039, marking the oldest known strain of the bacteria ever discovered. The strain is believed to be part of a lineage that emerged about 7,000 years ago.
The bacteria was found in the ancient man’s bloodstream.
“What’s most astonishing is that we can push back the appearance of Y. pestis 2,000 years farther than previously published studies suggested,” Ben Krause-Kyora, head of the aDNA Laboratory at the university and author of the study, said in a release.
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“It seems that we are really close to the origin of the bacteria,” he said.
The strain was likely less virulent and less contagious than the one that killed millions during the Black Death. The study says the ancient bacteria lacked the gene that first allowed fleas to act as vectors to spread the Bubonic plague, causing widespread transmission to human hosts.
The hunter-gatherer was likely infected through a bite from an infected rodent and he most likely died from the bacterial infection, but it’s probable that the disease progressed slowly.
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