Oldest known victim of bacteria that caused Black Death died 4,000 years before epidemic

Researchers analyzing his DNA found a large quantity of Y. pestis, 'whose descendants would later go on to kill over 25 million people in Europe in a mere three years, between 1347 and 1351

Researchers have discovered the oldest known victim of an ancient strain of the bacteria that caused the Bubonic plague, an epidemic that ravaged Europe and Asia in the mid-1300s.

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The discovery comes with a interesting historical twist — the victim lived more than 4,000 years before the plague first struck.

He was a hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age, researchers wrote in their study, published on Wednesday in Cell Reports, an online scientific journal. After dying in his 20s, he had been buried in a grave in what is now Latvia.

Anthropologists excavating his grave and those of three others — another man, a teenaged girl and a newborn — conducted genetic analyses simply to see whether the four people were related. During a screening of the DNA extracted from their bones and teeth, they inadvertently discovered the bacteria, Y. pestis.

Researchers analyzing his DNA found a large quantity of Y. pestis, whose descendants would later go on to kill more than 25 million people in Europe in a mere three years, between 1347 and 1351.

moar Y here… https://nationalpost.com/news/world/oldest-known-victim-of-bacteria-that-caused-black-death-died-4000-years-before-epidemic