Ancient DNA reveals plague outbreaks among Siberian hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago
Scientists analyzing DNA extracted from the teeth of people buried at hunter-gatherer cemeteries near Lake Baikal in Siberia found the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in 18 of 46 individuals — nearly 40%, a higher detection rate than at some medieval plague pits, Nature reported . Radiocarbon dating points to two distinct outbreaks, one roughly 5,520 to 5,265 years ago and another spanning 5,315 to 4,425 years ago.
The result reshapes the timeline of one of humanity’s deadliest diseases. It shows plague was already killing people in small, mobile foraging communities thousands of years before the dense farming settlements and cities long assumed necessary for such outbreaks. The early strains also carried a superantigen gene associated with high virulence, suggesting the pathogen was dangerous even before it evolved efficient flea-borne transmission — the mechanism that later drove the great historical pandemics.