Black Death’s ‘earliest victim’ is 5,000-year-old skeleton found with strain of the plague – World News

Scientists have found the earliest case of a human with a strain of the Black Death bacteria that is thought to have wiped out up to half of Europe’s population in the 14th century.

The Yersinia pestis bacteria has been found in the skeleton of a male that is dated to be around 5,000 years old, in the Rinnukalns region of Latvia.

Genetic analysis on the skeleton of a hunter-gather male, called RV 2039, shows that this strain of the bacteria was unlikely to be as deadly as the Black Death.

Scientists believe that over the following thousands of years the bacteria became more lethal and leading to the outbreak from 1346 to 1353 of the bubonic plague.

Ben Krause-Kyora, an archaeologist at the University of Kiel, Germany, reportedly believes that this example could be “really close” to the origin of the bacteria.

RV 2039 and another skeleton were found in the late 1800s in Rinnukalns and since then another two were found at the same site.

Tests by Krause-Kyora and his team have found that only RV 2039 of the four suffered from Yersinia pestis.

It is the earliest example of Yersinia pestis and experts believe that the bacteria separated from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis around 7,000 years ago.

“What’s so surprising is that we see already in this early strain more or less the complete genetic set of Y. pestis, and only a few genes are lacking,” said Krause-Kyora.

“But even a small shift in genetic settings can have a dramatic influence on virulence.”

Crucially for its spread, the strain found in RV 2039 didn’t have the gene responsible for transmission to human hosts, via fleas, leading to the Black Death.

It is also not clear how badly RV 2039 was affected by the bacteria although it is likely that he died from it.

But researchers think the course of the disease might have been fairly slow.

The 5,000-year-old strain was likely transmitted directly via a bite from an infected rodent and probably didn’t spread beyond RV 2039, according to the findings published in the journal Cell Report.

The people he was buried with were not infected and he was laid to rest carefully, which the authors say also makes a highly contagious respiratory version of the plague less likely.

Researchers say the conclusions that the early form of Y. pestis was likely to have been a slow-moving disease and was not very transmissible, challenge many theories about the development of human civilisation in Europe and Asia.