Rory McLeod

The theory was that we shouldn't see

major devastating outbreaks of a disease that affect entire communities until the Neolithic, until we have this farming revolution.

The theory was that we shouldn't see major devastating outbreaks of a disease that affect entire communities.

until the Neolithic, until we have this farming revolution.

Wait, this is true?

The theory was that we shouldn't see major devastating outbreaks of a disease that affect entire communities.

until the Neolithic, until we have this farming revolution.

Wait, this is true?

There was one particular site which had very high excess of dead children.

And as well as that, the radiocarbon data showed that these deaths took place over an extremely short time period.

Pretty much everybody seems to have died at the same time.

But there was no clear explanation for what could have caused this mass mortality.

There was no evidence for violence.

There was no evidence for skeletal trauma.

So for a long time, they really couldn't explain what had happened and were very interested in the possibility that ancient DNA might be able to shed some light on this.

Yeah, I don't think infectious disease was really something that immediately occurred to us.

So ancient DNA would potentially provide more insight into the identity of these individuals in terms of their ancestries, if these were an external group from the rest of the Baikal hunter-gatherers, for instance.

So we studied the remains of 46 individuals for these Baikal plague strains.

And we do see a lot of biological relatedness.

And so you see lots of cases of siblings being buried together in shared graves, parents being buried close by their offspring.