Scientists have found the oldest plague bacillus strain Yersinia pestis in the remains of an ancient man who lived on Earth about 5 thousand years ago.
About it writes Express.
In the course of genetic analysis, it was found that the ancestor of the plague pathogen that provoked the Black Death pandemic in the Middle Ages was previously less contagious and less deadly.
Skull, codenamed RV 2039, belonged to a man 20-30 years old. The remains were found in at the end of the 19th century in Latvia, but then they were lost until 2011, when they were stumbled upon in the private collection of an anthropologist Rudolf Virchow. Along with the skull, archaeologists then found three more burials.
The analysis investigated samples of dental tissue and skull bones of all four people. Scientists have identified a strain inside the bones Yersinia pestis and the genome itself was compared with the genomes of other ancient strains.
The ancient strain does not have a gene that promotes the transfer of the microorganism from fleas to humans and the formation of buboes in sick people with the bubonic form of the disease. A similar method of transferring a dangerous disease through fleas, it requires the death of the host person, after which the insects begin to move to other people, spreading the pathogen. According to scientists, it took more than a thousand years for the emergence of plague adaptation.
Now experts cannot answer what exactly the symptoms of the plague were in the ancient man. He probably died from a bacterial infection, and infection happened through a rodent bite.
We previously reported that the skull of an ancient “dragon-man” unknown to science was found in China.
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