Siberian Graves Reveal Devastating Stone Age Plague

An ancient plague outbreak has been identified in southeastern Siberia, significantly impacting late Stone Age hunter-gatherer communities around 5,500 years ago. Ancient DNA extracted from skeletal remains in burial sites points to devastating waves of the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Scientists analyzed dental pulp from 42 individuals across four cemeteries, finding Y. pestis DNA in 18.

The disease likely spread through contact with raw marmots and then person-to-person. The high mortality rate among children, with at least two-thirds of the dead under 15 in some sites, offers a new understanding of the disease's impact. This discovery challenges previous assumptions that only later agricultural settlements were vulnerable to such outbreaks. The findings suggest that close contact with wild animal reservoirs posed a significant risk to these ancient nomadic groups.