Death’s Silent Echo: Oldest Plague DNA Discovered in Britain Dates Back 4,000 Years

A scientific breakthrough has been achieved by researchers from the Francis Crick Institute as they have unearthed Britain’s oldest recorded evidence of plague, traced back to three 4,000-year-old cases of Yersinia pestis found in human remains. This specific strain, which was dominant during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, is thought to have entered Europe via human migration around 4,800 years ago. It lacks certain genes present in later strains, indicating a variant method of transmission.

This notable discovery, a collaboration between the Francis Crick Institute, the University of Oxford, the Levens Local History Group, and the Wells and Mendip Museum, has led to the identification of the earliest trace of plague in Britain. Three instances of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind the plague, were found in human remains from Somerset and Cumbria, dating back 4,000 years.

The researchers successfully identified three ancient British cases of Yersinia pestis, marking the oldest discovery of the plague in Britain. This finding was detailed in a paper published on May 30 in Nature Communications.

The team worked closely with the University of Oxford, the Levens Local History Group, and the Wells and Mendip Museum, and identified two Yersinia pestis cases in human remains from a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and a single case in a ring cairn monument in Levens, Cumbria.

By extracting dental pulp from small skeletal samples of 34 individuals across the two sites, the team screened for the presence of Yersinia pestis in the teeth. After analyzing the extracted DNA, they identified three cases of Yersinia pestis in two children aged between 10-12 years old and one woman aged between 35-45. Using radiocarbon dating, it was concluded that these individuals likely lived around the same time.

Previous records have identified the plague in several individuals from Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years before present, a period spanning the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. However, this strain hadn’t been recorded in Britain during this time. The wide geographic distribution suggests the strain was easily transmitted.

The Bronze Age, a period when humans first started to work with metal, is characterized by the use of bronze artifacts and implements, and started in 3200 BC, lasting until 800 BC in Europe. During this time, people migrated into Britain around 4,400 years ago, bringing distinctive artefacts like Beaker pottery, which were bell-shaped.

The strain of plague detected in this research – the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age lineage – was likely introduced to Central and Western Europe around 4,800 years ago by human settlers expanding into Eurasia. It now appears that this lineage also extended to Britain.

Genomic sequencing carried out by the researchers showed that this strain of Yersinia pestis closely resembles the strain identified in Eurasia during the same period. Interestingly, the individuals examined in this study lacked the yapC and ymt genes, found in later strains of the plague and known to be crucial for plague transmission via fleas. This suggests that this strain was not transmitted in this way, unlike later plague strains, such as the one responsible for the Black Death.

Given the rapid degradation of pathogenic DNA in potentially incomplete or eroded samples, it is also plausible that other individuals at these burial sites could have been infected with the same strain of plague.

The Charterhouse Warren site, where a mass burial took place, is unique because the buried individuals appear to have died from trauma, rather than a plague outbreak. However, they may have been infected at the time of their death.