![\"Marmots](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c1_6125994.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDisease long associated with Europe believed to have emerged far earlier in Siberia<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMarmots are thought to have spread the plague among ancient hunter-gatherers around Lake Baikal in Siberia. (Photo: AFP)\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The plague was causing deadly outbreaks among communities of hunter-gatherers in Siberia around 5,500 years ago, according to a study on Wednesday that sheds light on how humans could have first caught this scourge.<\/p>\n
The plague is generally associated with rats spreading the disease through crowded mediaeval cities, sparking pandemics such as the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people across Europe from the 1300s to 1800s.<\/p>\n
This was a long way from the rugged vistas surrounding Lake Baikal in the Russian region of Siberia, where archaeologists have spent decades studying the burial sites of pre-historic hunter-gatherers.<\/p>\n
One of these sites has been particularly mystifying because of its \u201cvery unusual mortality profile\u201d \u2014 many children and adolescents appear to have died over a short period, Oxford University researcher Ruairidh Macleod told journalists.<\/p>\n
The skeletons also bore no signs of violence or trauma, meaning there was \u201cno reasonable explanation\u201d for this catastrophic event, said the lead author of the new study in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n
When the team of researchers sequenced ancient DNA from 46 people across four sites near the lake, they found Yersinia pestis \u2014 the bacteria responsible for the plague \u2014 in 18 of them.<\/p>\n
This means nearly 40 percent of these people had the plague \u2014 a higher rate than has been detected in some medieval mass graves. Trying to identify plague in such ancient DNA also throws up many false negatives.<\/p>\n
The results were therefore \u201cconsistent with pretty much everybody having died of plague\u201d at the burial sites across two outbreaks, the earliest of which was 5,500 years ago, Macleod said.<\/p>\n
This was a \u201ccomplete surprise,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Not a \u2018golden age\u2019<\/p>\n
Until this discovery, the oldest traces of plague had been detected among farming communities in northern Europe around 5,300 years ago.<\/p>\n
However exactly how deadly these ancient strains were has been \u201chotly debated\u201d in the scientific community, according to the new study\u2019s senior study author Eske Willerslev.<\/p>\n
It had been thought that this kind of outbreak could not occur among hunter-gatherers, said the geneticist at Cambridge University and the University of Copenhagen.<\/p>\n
Because they lived in small groups and were constantly moving around, it was believed that \u201cinfectious disease can\u2019t really take a hold and devastate entire communities\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
This led the authors of some best-selling pop science books such as Yuval Noah Harari of \u201cSapiens\u201d and Jared Diamond to portray the time of hunter-gatherers as a \u201ckind of golden age\u201d without disease or illness, Willerslev said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, it wasn\u2019t that easy to be a hunter-gatherer,\u201d he said, adding that it now looks like the plague was probably \u201cvery common\u201d for them.<\/p>\n
It was famously rats that spread the plague in the Middle Ages, but for these prehistoric Siberian outbreaks, a different animal was likely to blame: the Tarbagan marmot.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarmots are thought to be the original host species that plague first evolved in,\u201d Macleod explained.<\/p>\n
Even today, cases of plague spread by marmots are regularly recorded in Siberia and Mongolia, where the rodents are hunted for their fur and meat.<\/p>\n
This could have also been how the hunter-gatherers originally caught the virus.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresumably the first infection was from an animal interaction and then spread among humans\u201d via respiratory droplets, said study co-author Astrid Iversen, a virology professor at Oxford.<\/p>\n
She pointed out that today, the World Health Organization estimates three-quarters of all new infectious diseases jump over from animals into humans.<\/p>\n
So these unlucky ancient-gatherers can provide a lesson for modern humans.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing able to understand the links between when they infect humans from animals and how they\u2019ve evolved to be able to do that at different contexts and different places in time and space is really important for understanding the risk of that happening in the future,\u201d Macleod said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disease long associated with Europe believed to have emerged far earlier in Siberia Marmots are thought to have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[88046,2133,103,65034,61,60,53193,216050,6831,54769,216049],"class_list":["post-505457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-ancient-dna","tag-archaeology","tag-health","tag-hunter-gatherers","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lake-baikal","tag-marmots","tag-plague","tag-siberia","tag-yersinia-pestis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}