DNA from 4,000-year-old plague discovered—the oldest cases to date in Britain
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified three 4,000-year-old British cases of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria causing the plague—the oldest evidence of the plague in Britain to date, reported in a paper ...
Working with the University of Oxford, the Levens Local History Group and the Wells and Mendip Museum identified two cases of Yersinia pestis in human remains found in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria.
They took small skeletal samples from 34 individuals across the two sites, screening for the presence of Yersinia pestis in teeth. This technique is performed in a specialist clean room facility where they drill into the tooth and extract dental pulp, which can trap DNA remnants of infectious diseases.
They then analyzed the DNA and identified three cases of Yersinia pestis in two children estimated to be aged between 10 and 12 years old when they died, and one woman aged between 35 and 45. Radiocarbon dating was used to show it's likely the three people lived at roughly the same time.
The plague has previously been identified in several individuals from Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years before present (BP), a period spanning the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age (termed LNBA), but hadn't been seen before in Britain at this point in time. The wide geographic spread suggests that this strain of the plague may have been easily transmitted.
This strain of the plague—the LNBA lineage—was likely brought into Central and Western Europe around 4,800 BP by humans expanding into Eurasia, and now this research suggests that it extended to Britain.
Using genome sequencing, the researchers showed that this strain of the Yersinia pestis looks very similar to the strain identified in Eurasia at the same time.
Levens Park ring cairn in Cumbria, UK. To the right of the solitary large boulder is a circular penannular ring with three ~4,000 year old female inhumation burials, one of which carried Yersinia pestis DNA sequenced in the present study. Credit: Ian Hodkinson
Map showing the distribution of LNBA Yersinia pestis strains. New genomes sequenced in this study are in purple. Credit: Pooja Swali et al. Nature Communications.