So much for that theory.
Welcome to the world’s first plague cemetery
The Angara River flows from the depths of Lake Baikal. The people who lived along its banks thousands of years ago survived by hunting, foraging and fishing. They may have lived in relatively small groups, but they appear to have been linked across distances of hundreds of kilometers through marriage and family ties. Although their lifestyle may have been one of constant movement, they buried their dead in cemeteries such as Ust-Ida, while also offering them pottery, stone tools, and bone and horn points.
This map shows the location of the Ust-Ida I and Shumilikha cemeteries near Lake Baikal and the Angara River
Credit: By Tara Young, taray@ualberta.ca and NASA https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/api/ – GDEM freely available from NASA https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/api/, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21156871
This map shows the location of the Ust-Ida I and Shumilikha cemeteries near Lake Baikal and the Angara River
Credit: By Tara Young, taray@ualberta.ca and NASA https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/api/ – GDEM freely available from NASA https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/api/, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21156871
At Ust’-Ida, archaeologists from the Baikal Archaeological Project uncovered a serious mystery: an unusually high number of dead children, a set of radiocarbon dates suggests that many of the cemetery’s occupants died at approximately the same time, and there was no evidence of violence. Something tragic happened to this ancient hunter-gatherer community, but what? Archaeologists thought the ancient DNA might shed some light on the mystery.
McLeod and his colleagues started with shotgun sequencing, a technique used to identify DNA sequences in a sample when scientists don’t know exactly what organism they’re looking for. They used tooth root samples from 46 ancient people from four different cemeteries along the Angara River.
And they were completely surprised when they got the plague.
Fun fact: Because the roots of teeth are fed by so many blood vessels, anything in your bloodstream is likely to pass through your teeth at some point, which means if you die of plague, it could leave its DNA in your teeth. “This is really good evidence that plague was in the bloodstream, which is deadly,” co-author Frederik Sersholm, an ancient DNA researcher at the University of Copenhagen, said at a press conference, clearly noticing a fun fact.
Of the 31 people MacLeod and colleagues tested in Ust’-Ida, about 11 Y. pestis There is DNA in their teeth, and MacLeod says it is “consistent with almost everyone else’s.” [in the cemetery] Died of the plague,” not just those 11. This is because the detection rate of plague DNA in the remains at Ust’-Ida matches that of DNA from Smithfield, a known mass grave specifically for plague victims in London. It is safe to assume that everyone buried there had the plague.
<a href