DNA from 4,000-year-old plague discovered—the oldest cases to date in Britain thecrick NatureComms
Levens Park ring cairn in Cumbria, UK. To the right of the solitary large boulder is a circular penannular ring with three ~4,000 year old female inhumation burials, one of which carried Yersinia pestis DNA sequenced in the present study. Credit: Ian Hodkinson
They took small skeletal samples from 34 individuals across the two sites, screening for the presence of Yersinia pestis in teeth. This technique is performed in a specialist clean room facility where they drill into the tooth and extract dental pulp, which can trap DNA remnants of infectious diseases.
The plague has previously been identified in several individuals from Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years before present , a period spanning the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age , but hadn't been seen before in Britain at this point in time. The wide geographic spread suggests that this strain of the plague may have been easily transmitted.
The individuals identified all lacked the yapC and ymt genes, which are seen in later strains of plague, the latter of which is known to play an important role in plague transmission via fleas. This information has previously suggested that this strain of the plague was not transmitted via fleas, unlike later plague strains such as the one that caused the Black Death.
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