The Plague’s Stone Age Origins

The plague likely entered Europe during the Neolithic era with a large-scale migration of people from the Eurasian Steppe, according to new research from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

If correct, the new findings suggest that the plague causing Yersinia pestis bacteria arrived in Europe millennia before the first known historical epidemics.

The scientists from the Max Planck Institute have sequenced the first six European genomes of Y.pestis as part of research that aims analyse ancient forms of the disease in a bid to understand its evolution.