Michael > April 13th, 2022, 12:19 AM
Quote:The study analyzed the genome of 252 individuals who lived between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago, including 17 who were killed by the plague. Researchers have compared bacteria from this time with bacteria from the worst known plague pandemics, including the Justinianic Plague in the 6th century and the Black Death in the 14th century, which killed one in three Europeans. “It is the most complete set of cases that has been gathered to date,” says Andrades, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Germany.
Only two other deaths from the bubonic plague have been identified from this time: a man and a woman, aged around 35, who were buried huddled together facing each other with clasped hands 3,800 years ago.
These bodies were found in the Russian region of Samara, which is more than 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) from the dolmen in Álava. But in both cases, the pathogen already had the genetic adaptations necessary to cause the bubonic plague, in particular the ymt gene that allows Yersinia pestis to colonize fleas. From a genetic point of view, the bacterium found in El Sotillo is evolutionarily older than the Russian one, so there is a possibility that the bubonic plague could have originated in the Iberian peninsula and not in Eurasia, as previously thought.