4,000 year old plague found in human remains in Somerset
The research was led by the University of East Anglia, University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute
Last updated 15th Jun 2024
The oldest case of the plague in Britain has been discovered after samples on human remains were taken in Somerset and Cumbria.
It's thanks to researchers at the University of East Anglia, working with scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and the University of Oxford, as well of members of the Levens Local History Group and the Wells and Mendip Museum.
The 4,000-year-old plague was found in DNA, which is the oldest evidence of the disease in the UK.
The research
Francis Crick Institute scientists identified three cases of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria causing the plague, in human remains - two in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset, and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria.
The team took small skeletal samples from 34 individuals across the two sites, looking for the presence of Yersinia pestis in teeth.
This technique involves drilling into the tooth and extracting dental pulp, which can trap DNA remnants of infectious diseases.
Pooja Swali, first author and PhD student at the Crick, said: "The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, from thousands of years ago, is incredible.
"These genomes can inform us of the spread and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and hopefully help us understand which genes may be important in the spread of infectious diseases.
"We see that this Yersinia pestis lineage, including genomes from this study, loses genes over time, a pattern that has emerged with later epidemics caused by the same pathogen."
The researchers also analysed the DNA and identified three cases of Yersinia pestis in two children thought to be 10 to 12 years old when they died, and one woman aged between 35 and 45.
According to the findings, it is likely the three people lived at roughly the same time.
Previously the plague has 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).
However, the researchers suggest it had not been seen before in Britain at this point in time.
The wide geographic spread suggests this strain of the plague may have been easily transmitted.
According to the researchers, 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.
Further analysis of the samples suggests this strain of the Yersinia pestis looks very similar to the strain identified in Eurasia at the same time.
All of the people identified in the new study lacked the yapC and ymt genes, which are seen in later strains of plague, the latter of which is known to play an important role in plague transmission via fleas.
This information has previously suggested this strain of the plague was not transmitted via fleas, unlike later plague strains such as the one that caused the Black Death.
Because pathogenic DNA - DNA from bacteria, protozoa, or viruses which cause disease - breaks down very quickly in samples which might be incomplete or eroded, it is possible that other people at these burial sites may have been infected with the same strain of plague.
An 'evolutionary arms race'
Researchers say the Charterhouse Warren site is rare as it does not match other funeral sites from the time period - the people buried there appear to have died from trauma.
It is thought people at this site may not have been buried due to an outbreak of plague, but that they were infected at the time they died.
Pontus Skoglund, group leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Crick, said: "This research is a new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the ancient genomic record of pathogens and humans, and how we co-evolved.
"We understand the huge impact of many historical plague outbreaks, such as the Black Death, on human societies and health, but ancient DNA can document infectious disease much further into the past.
"Future research will do more to understand how our genomes responded to such diseases in the past, and the evolutionary arms race with the pathogens themselves, which can help us to understand the impact of diseases in the present or in the future."
The findings are published in Nature Communications.