Ancient DNA reveals 5,500-year-old Siberian plague outbreak (opens in new tab)

An international research team reported in Nature that ancient DNA from Late Neolithic hunter-gatherer burials near Lake Baikal in Siberia provides the earliest known outbreak-level evidence of plague, dating to about 5,500 years ago. The researchers detected Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, in 18 people from four burial sites; several accounts of the study say the team analyzed 46 people, a detection rate of nearly 40%. The affected groups lived in small, mobile hunter-gath...