HEALTH × GENETICS

Plague Before the Pandemics

~4,900 years ago

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian

Millennia before Justinian and the Black Death, plague was already travelling. DNA of Yersinia pestis has been recovered from Eurasian skeletons of the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age: a single early lineage that spread fast from Siberia to Iberia, lacking the flea adaptations of later strains. By about 3,800 years ago, in the Volga region, the fully flea-borne form behind bubonic plague existed as well.

Why it matters

Epidemic disease is not a side effect of cities and ships; it rode the first great overland networks. The early lineage's spread tracks the age when steppe herders were moving into Europe, and one proposal ties the germ's journeys to those migrations. Plague's deep history also shows a pathogen taking shape by steps, genes lost and genes gained, long before it had a name.

Dating & uncertainty

The early strains date from roughly 5,000 to 3,500 years ago across Eurasia. They lack key genes for living in fleas, so how they spread and what disease they caused remain uncertain; the flea-adapted form behind true bubonic plague appears by about 3,800 years ago in the Samara region, a millennium earlier than once thought.

Sources

1. Andrades Valtueña et al. (2017), Current Biology · The Stone Age plague and its persistence in Eurasiadoi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.10.025
2. Spyrou et al. (2018), Nature Communications · Analysis of 3800-year-old Yersinia pestis genomes suggests Bronze Age origin for bubonic plaguedoi:10.1038/s41467-018-04550-9
3. Andrades Valtueña et al. (2022), PNAS · Stone Age Yersinia pestis genomes shed light on the early evolution, diversity, and ecology of plaguedoi:10.1073/pnas.2116722119

Our species’ history as one day

23:37:3622 min 24 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day