New evidence suggests that a man who died about 5,000 years ago in Latvia was the first to be infected with the earliest-known strain of the diseases that caused the Black Death.
The plague is the oldest and most widespread pandemic to hit Europe in the 1300s wiping out more than half of the population. Later waves of the black death regularly strike over several centuries causing millions of deaths.
Understanding the Black Death
According to History, the Black Death was the most devastating global epidemic of the bubonic plague that enshrouded Europe and Asia during the mid-1300s.
The plague is known to have first arrived in Europe on October 1347, after 12 ships from the Black sea docked at ports in Sicily. People that gathered on the docks were shocked with a horrifying surprise where most sailors aboard were dead, with those who clung to life were gravely ill and covered in oozing black boils with blood and puss.
Officials hurriedly ordered the fleet of ships harboring the shocking site out of the harbor but it was in vain. Over the next 5 years, the Black Death would annihilate more than 20 million people in Europe, roughly a third of the continent's population.
5,000 Year Old Man Might Be Patient Zero of the Black Death
According to Dr. Ben Krause-Kyora, co-author of the study from the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, Kiel University, Germany, the remains of the 5,300-year-old man is the oldest-identified plague victim today.
In the study published in the journal Cell Reports, entitled "A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis" the man was buried with 3 others in a Neolithic burial site in Lativia near the riverside of the River Salac that flowed to the Baltic Sea.
Researchers then sequenced DNA from all four bones using bone and teeth specimens to identify bacterias and viruses. Surprisingly, the team found one of the hunter-gatherers, suspected to be in his twenties, was infected with the first strain of the Yersinia pestis bacterium that caused the Black Death epidemic.
Dr. Krause-Kyora explains that the man may have been bitten by a rodent, got the first infection of the bacteria, and died a few days or a week later due to septic shock, the BBC reports.
The study suggests that the ancient strain of the bacteria first emerged roughly 7,000 years ago, during the boom of agriculture in central Europe. Researchers believe that the bacterium leaped sporadically from animal vectors to humans without causing a substantial outbreak. Over time, the bacteria could have adapted to infecting humans primarily, eventually evolving into what is known as the Bubonic Plague that spread by fleas and ravaged throughout medieval Europe, causing the deaths of millions of citizens.
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