1350. The plague rages in London. It is estimated that the Black Death claimed around two million victims in the city alone. Researchers across Europe say that around a third of the population has died from the plague. The plague came and went in waves, culminating in Britain in 1665. However, the plague bacterium seems to have reached the British Isles much earlier than previously thought, as a recent excavation shows.
A team led by researcher Pooja Swali from the Francis Crick Institute in London found traces of the plague-causing pathogen, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, on the remains of three people who died around 4000 years ago at two different sites in England. In south-west England and northern England, the scientists examined 34 skeletons of people from the late Stone Age and early Bronze Age. The researchers found what they were looking for in three of the people examined: Yersinia pestis was found in the samples taken from the dental pulp of the deceased. The research group reports on their finds in trade journal Nature Communications.
The burial site in Somerset in southwest England is therefore a mass grave in which at least 40 dead found their final resting place about 15 meters underground. Tooth samples were taken from 30 people, but a plague infection could only be clearly proven in two – which does not mean, however, that the other people were not also ill with the plague. The two infected are said to have been two children between the ages of ten and twelve. It is striking that the bones of those buried in Somerset show signs of violence. This leads the researchers to conclude that it is not a plague grave, but that the mass grave was dug after a violent confrontation. At the second site in Cumbria, northern England, four people were found buried. The researchers were able to detect the plague DNA in one of them, a woman between 35 and 45 years old.
“It’s unbelievable that you can find pathogens in samples that are thousands of years old,” Swali was quoted as saying in a statement by the Francis Crick Institute. “This genetic information helps us to understand which genes are important for the spread of infectious diseases.” Because when they analyzed the plague DNA found, the researchers found that the gene that plays a key role in transmission by fleas is missing.
As a result, it was not the vermin that brought the plague to Britain that were responsible for spreading the Black Death some 3,400 years later. However, it could be proven that the genetic material of the plague bacteria discovered in Great Britain shows great similarity with plague DNA from the Bronze Age from today’s Germany. The research team explains this geographical spread by saying that it could be an easily transmitted strain of the plague.