Posted on 06/13/2019 10:32:58 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Nearly 5000 years ago, a 20-year-old woman was buried in a tomb in Sweden... Now, researchers have discovered what killed her -- Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. The sample is one of the oldest ever found, and it belongs to a previously unknown branch of the Y. pestis evolutionary tree. This newly discovered strain of plague could have caused the collapse of large Stone Age settlements across Europe in what might be the world's first pandemic, researchers on the project say. But other scientists contend there isn't yet enough evidence to prove the case.
The newly discovered Neolithic bacterium belongs to a branch of the plague family tree separate from the later, better-known strains. It split off from a common ancestor about 5700 years ago, Rasmussen and Rascovan say. But it's not the common ancestor itself, meaning it doesn't reveal where or when plague originated, says Johannes Krause, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who has also studied ancient plague. "I'm not sure we have a good sense of how far back [plague] goes," agrees Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist who studies ancient pathogens at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Rasmussen and Rascovan have an idea. During the Neolithic, the region in Eastern Europe that today includes Moldova, Romania, and parts of Ukraine was home to large "megasettlements" of tens of thousands of people belonging to what archaeologists call the Trypillia culture. Though their settlements weren't complex enough to qualify as cities, their residents still lived in close quarters with poor sanitation and stores of grain that would have attracted rodents, Y. pestis's wild host. "These megasettlements are the textbook example of a place where a pathogen could evolve," Rasmussen says.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
Usually I edit out stuff that happens to have made it in. I didn’t this time. Probably got that added by accident. :^(
Could be, although it seems like it would happen more often, and would involve dismantling of a “sick” structure, the demolition then taken a safe distance out of town and incinerated. Also, could easily have been both ways — the comprehensive fires that took everything at once being the unplanned events.
“An accident with a contraceptive in a time machine.” — Douglas Adams
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