Oldest Evidence of Plague Found in 4000-Year-Old British DNA

Researchers have found the earliest known evidence of the plague in Britain, in DNA found in human teeth dating to 4,000 years ago. The lineage of Y. pestis was significantly contagious, and the bacteria was found in two separate locations in England. The bubonic plague triggered the 14th-century pandemic, which killed at least one-third of Europe’s population. The bacterial DNA in the new study, as well as other genomes from across Eurasia at the time, lacked a gene that played a role in transmission by fleas.