Scientists Discovered Revelatory New Evidence of the Bubonic Plague

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Researchers have found evidence of the earliest known presence of the bubonic plague in Britain.

The team analyzed the teeth of 4,000-year-old bodies found in two mass graves in England, and found evidence of plague infection in three individuals.

The strain of plague found in these bodies was slightly different from the one that caused the Black Death event, and may not have been able to be transmitted by fleas.

Even having lived through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic over the course of the last few years, there's probably not a more famous disease in the world than the bubonic plague. After all, it's often literally simply referred to as "the plague." If your disease becomes so all-encompassing that just referencing the idea of widespread disease brings it to mind, your notoriety is pretty cemented.

For some time, the plague was thought to not have reached Britain until after about 2,500 years ago, even though it was present throughout Europe long before then. But according to new research, the plague was around in Great Britain a lot sooner than we thought—thousands of years sooner.

Two previously undiscovered mass graves have been unearthed—one in Somerset, England and one in Cumbria, England—and both were found to contain individuals infected with a strain of the plague from 4,000 years ago, marking the earliest evidence of the disease's presence in Britain. In total, the team found evidence of the plague in three individuals.

These finding come as the result of a detailed genetic analysis project screening the unearthed bodies for Yersinia pestis—the bacteria that causes the plague. While the bacteria would not be detectable in many parts of the body, researchers were able to find residual evidence of its presence by looking in the teeth of 34 individuals uncovered in these mass graves. The core of a tooth, which is made of a substance called dental pulp, can hold onto remnants of the DNA of diseases.

"This research is a new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the ancient genomic record of pathogens and humans, and how we co-evolved," Pontus Skoglund, one of the researchers on this project, said in a press release.

While this is the same bacteria that caused the bubonic plague, it's a slightly different strain. Specifically, it's missing the yapC and ymt genes. The ymt gene is especially key here, as it is known to have been important to the disease's ability to spread through fleas. The spread of Yersinia pestis through fleas carried on rats is known to have been the main driver behind the Black Death event that killed millions of people over the span of just a few years. Its absence from this strain obviously doesn't mean the disease wasn't transmittable, as multiple bodies in the burial sites were infected—just that it spread by a slightly different mechanism.

Interestingly–according to a more comprehensive analysis of the bodies containing the Yersinia pestis strain—individuals from the Somerset mass graves don't seem to have died from the plague, even thought they were infected. Instead, they seem to have died from unrelated trauma. While other bodies in the burial site could have been infected, the research team believes this was not a burial site specifically for plague victims. The mass grave and the presence of the bubonic plague, amazingly, may have just been a coincidence.

Coincidence or not, new information on one of the biggest tragedies of all time is always welcome and informative.

"We understand the huge impact of many historical plague outbreaks, such as the Black Death, on human societies and health, but ancient DNA can document infectious disease much further into the past," Skoglund said in a news release. "Future research will do more to understand how our genomes responded to such diseases in the past, and the evolutionary arms race with the pathogens themselves, which can help us to understand the impact of diseases in the present or in the future."

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