© Karl-Göran Sjögren/University of Gothenburg
A young woman who died of an early form of plague was buried in this Neolithic grave in Sweden.
A young woman who died of an early form of plague was buried in this Neolithic grave in Sweden.
"Plague is starting to seem like it's everywhere," says Kyle Harper, a historian at the University of Oklahoma in Norman who studies how the disease affected human societies. Ancient plague genomes, such as the one in the new study, show "we have a really long history with this germ," he says.
Until now, the oldest known strain of plague came to Europe with the Yamnaya, herders from the central Eurasian steppe who swept into the continent some 4800 years ago. That was followed, several thousand years later, by the strain that led to both the Justinian Plague, which afflicted the Roman Empire in the sixth century C.E., and the Black Death, which killed half of Europe's population in the 1300s.
Comment: The evidence shows that plague along with changes to weather patterns, increased seismic and volcanic activity, and cometary bombardment, are part of a collection of disasters that relatively regularly visit our planet:
- The great global change game: Our civilization is headed for the fate of the Bronze Age - destruction
- Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse
- The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction
- Prehistoric cave art study reveals ancient people had complex knowledge of astronomy and were tracking catastrophic meteor showers
- Pestilence, the Great Plague and the Tobacco Cure
- 536 AD: Plague, famine, drought, cold, and a mysterious fog that lasted 18 months
- 6 children dead after outbreak of life-threatening virus strain at New Jersey health facility - UPDATE: death toll now at 11
And for more on the events that accompany plague, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!