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The Black Death notoriously swept through Europe in 1347, killing an estimated 50 million people. Yet DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons now shows that the plague had first emerged at least as early as 3,000 bc. The earlier outbreak probably did not spread as ferociously, the analysis reveals — but it may nonetheless have driven mass migrations across Europe and Asia.
The bacterium Yersinia pestis is suspected to have caused the Black Death and other ancient plagues. Historical descriptions of the disease’s quick spread and symptoms such as pus-filled growths match modern outbreaks of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium, and the remains of ancient plague victims have been found to contain Y. pestis DNA.
The earliest of these infections comes from a burial in Germany linked to the six-century Plague of Justinian. Yet some historians suspect that Y. pestis was also responsible for earlier outbreaks such as the Plague of Athens, which struck the city-state in the fifth century bc, at the height of the Peloponnesian War.
The Bronze Age — between about 3000 and 1000 bc — was a tumultuous period that saw new cultural practices and weapon and transport technologies spread rapidly across Eurasia. Earlier this year, a pair of ancient-genome studies documented a massive exodus of people from the steppe of what is now Russia and Ukraine; they scattered west into Europe and east into central Asia.
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