The oldest evidence of plague in Britain is over 4,000 years old

An outbreak of violence

Researchers sampled the teeth of 34 skeletons found in two British The Bronze Age burial sites at Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and at Levens Park in Cumbria. As teeth are very resistant to decay, the dental pulp they contain may retain fragments of Y. pestis DNA left behind during an infection.

Two teeth from Chartehouse Warren, believed to be from children aged around 10 and 12, contained traces of plague, as did the tooth of a 35-45 year old woman from Levens Park. Although there is no evidence that the other skeletons contained Y. pestis DNA, the researchers cannot rule out that other people also had the disease due to the difficulty in detecting its presence.

If other people had the plague, it could help solve a historical mystery in Charterhouse Warren. The 30 skeletons found here were all thrown into a rock-cut pit and show signs of trauma just before they died and were dismembered.

It is possible that this group was attacked because they were suffering from the plague, with one of the infected children showing signs of trauma. Proving that the other skeletons at the site were also infected with the plague might provide more evidence that this was the case.

The presence of distinctive signs goblet pottery among the skeletons suggests the strain found in Britain may have been brought to the island during ancient migrations around 4,400 years ago.

By using the Y. pestis the DNA that was extracted, the team was also able to sequence the genome of the bacteria. Their analysis revealed that this plague strain lacked important genes, including ‘ymt’, which enhances the plague’s ability to survive in and spread through fleas.

Samples of Y. pestis carrying the ymt gene have been known for about 200 years after the British burials in this study, suggesting that Bronze Age Europe would have had a variety of different strains in circulation at the same time.

Question PoojaPhD student at the Crick Institute who led the study, says: ‘The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, dating back thousands of years, is incredible.

“These genomes can tell us about 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.”