Chapter 1: What is the prehistoric plague and its historical significance?
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Now the first historically recorded plague outbreak, the Justinian Plague, began in 541 AD, but new evidence has revealed something startling. Ancient DNA studies have discovered traces of Yersinia pestis dating back more than 5,000 years ago. Proof that this disease was already devastating Eurasia in the late Neolithic period nearly 3,500 years earlier than the first recorded plague.
So where did it come from? What was happening in Eurasia 5,000 years ago that sparked this outbreak? Could this plague have triggered a Neolithic collapse, a Stone Age collapse, and signalled the dawn of the Bronze Age in Europe? Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are telling the story of this prehistoric plague.
Our guest is the science journalist and author, Laura Spinney. Laura, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here.
And it is good to see you in person. We've done two episodes in the past on Proto-Indo-European and the origins of mythology. First time that we've done it face-to-face, though, and for prehistoric plagues. I mean, what a topic. This is another great topic where science is now revealing this hidden but incredibly important part of the prehistory of humans.
Yeah, it totally is. It's very, very exciting right now because obviously from historical records, we know about epidemics and pandemics that have devastated humanity and changed the course of history. But historical records only go back 5,000 years or so. So now we have the tools to look before that. And so historians and prehistorians have long suspected that
disease had a hand in shaping populations and shaping history. And there's the famous quote that I love from the anthropologist James C. Scott, who says, you know, infectious disease has been the loudest silence in the archaeological record. He was thinking particularly of the Neolithic period, so about 10,000 years ago.
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Chapter 2: How did Yersinia pestis emerge in the Neolithic period?
But it's being challenged by now the evidence that is coming to light mainly with ancient DNA.
So let's highlight this importance of kind of close connection with animals and how that might well have been a key part of this story. Because when we talk about plague, what exactly do we mean? What disease are we talking about when we say the word plague?
Yeah, it's a very good question because plague has become sort of generalized, hasn't it? And I think it's a kind of measure of how devastating and terrifying this particular disease was in history that sort of everything got called by that one label. But When we talk about plague as a specific disease, we tend to mean bubonic plague.
There are other varieties of the same disease that is caused by the same microbe, the same bacterium, that is Yersinia pestis, Y-pestis for short. But bubonic plague, you know, this horrible disease where it starts out with fever and headache and then you start to develop these buboes, swellings of the lymph nodes. And before antibiotics, it was, you know, almost certainly lethal.
And there are two main varieties of that disease that we know about from history and also from, you know, places where we get cases today because we still get cases of plague today. Mm-hmm.
septicemic form so in the blood and the pneumonic form so that's the lungs that are affected and it's considered the sort of the most dangerous because it's transmitted on the air on the breath so coughs and droplets that come out when you cough and sneeze and so very highly contagious form of the disease and just as lethal but spreads faster for that reason.
So that's the disease we're talking about. It's the one responsible, we now know, again, thanks to ADNA, definitely for the Black Death of the mid-14th century and the Plague of London, the one that devastated London in the 1700s.
Was it 1666, near the Great Fire?
Exactly, a happy time for Londoners. But yes, and it's only about 15 years that we've been able to prove definitively that Y-pestis caused the Black Death. Because if you think about it, most of the evidence we have for death in the past is cemeteries. Also historical records, but again, historical records are not always available. But
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Chapter 3: What evidence suggests plague existed over 5,000 years ago?
And generally speaking, infectious diseases don't leave a mark. It's quite rare that they leave a mark on bones. So, you know, you've got no evidence really unless, you know, that's why mummies have been such a valuable source of information about infectious diseases in the great past because you do have the soft tissue preserved in a mummy. But obviously they're not that numerous.
So the ability to extract DNA from skeletons, from teeth, has really transformed our whole understanding of the role of infectious disease in the human past.
And can you explain the role of animals in the spread of this disease? Why do we also call it a zoonotic pathogen?
Yeah, so this goes back to the idea that the invention of farming was the point at which many of these diseases crossed the species barrier. And the idea is that they were animal diseases originally. We know that because often many of these diseases, including plague, still have animal reservoirs. So if there's no humans around, or even if there are, they may also infect animals' populations.
And the idea is that when farming was being developed, people started to live more closely with the animals they had domesticated. And therefore, there was the perfect sort of petri dish, if you like, to use a laboratory term, for the microbe to experiment jumping into humans. And probably most attempts would have failed.
because you've got to have the right mutations to be able to infect the cells of a different species. But you know, it's got this constant, it's got this long capacity to keep experimenting, and of course microbes reproduce very quick, so it doesn't really matter if one doesn't work, you're going to keep trying with different generations, different mutations.
eventually one might take in the new host and you know you might get a little just one case you might get a tiny little outbreak might fizzle out but if you know this is natural selection in action in a microbe if the virus or bacterium is able to reproduce more of itself in the new host
then it'll have an advantage and it will become adapted to that new host, and it will change genetically, evolve to acquire adaptations to that new host, may even become specialised to that new host, although it may also keep the animal host.
Anyway, this is evolution and how diseases adapt to new hosts, and the idea is that farming created the perfect laboratory for these disease pathogens to do that.
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Chapter 4: Could the prehistoric plague have caused a societal collapse?
But he was sort of saying, you know, when we see in the archaeological record a sudden collapse of an early city or town, you know, it might be civil war, it might be that, but often it's very localized to the one settlement. And he was speculating that maybe it would have been a local epidemic that we just simply don't have any evidence for.
And now we at least have that capacity to go and look back and see what role it played.
I know you've done a lot of work on more recent pandemics like the Spanish flu and the like. How can studying more recent pandemics actually be useful when going back into prehistoric times and trying to learn more about what an epidemic might have looked like back then?
Yeah, so if you think back to COVID, not that long ago, although it seems a long time, doesn't it?
It does, I know, yes, very much so.
You remember that everybody, well, lots of people learned the word epidemiology for the first time. And we learned about these people whose job it was to basically track the evolution of the virus and even predict what might be the next strain that came out and try and get ahead of the game and start testing for it.
And perhaps even once the vaccine came online, start to modify the vaccine to be able to cope with new strains. And so that was a lot of the scientific work that went into that pandemic. Well, that's essentially what is happening all the time in microbes. It's branching, creating new strains. Some of them don't work, so they fizzle out.
Some of them do, so they replace all the other ones that were there before. And then they start again and branch and create a new tree. And so we can watch that in action in a pandemic that we live through with the tools that we have today. And we can know that that was happening also in the past. There are many more people alive today. We travel much faster, we're much more connected.
So perhaps the timings and the capacity for the virus to spread are greater today. But then we also have drugs. We also have, you know, we understand how to stop it to some extent too. they didn't have in the past. I mean, if you think about those very first epidemics in the earliest cities, they must have been absolutely terrifying.
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Chapter 5: What role did farming play in the spread of diseases?
But that also, it highlights that the remains that were used in this project would have largely been skeletons. It would have been like the mandible. It would have been the petrous bone in the ear because those are the best ones for preserving DNA, not just of themselves, but also of the microbes.
And just so I can get my head around it as well, how can we distinguish between microbe DNA and the human's personal DNA?
So I guess that they will be pulling it all out together, but then they can distinguish it with their clever techniques because the genomes of the human and of the microbe will be very different sizes and have very different profiles, so it's quite easy to distinguish. Right.
Thank you for the science. So you've got the evidence of plagues from 5,000 years ago, which we'll get to, but I'd also like to ask, because this seems like a big project where they also analyse remains older than 5,000 years ago.
Yes.
So in those ones, did they find any examples of microbes at all?
Yeah. So just to say also that because you've got the human evidence as well, you can say things, for example, you've got radiocarbon dating. So you can say, for example, how old a cemetery is, when people were buried there. You can also say whether they're related to each other and then you can look at the diseases that affected them.
So you can see how those diseases were spreading in the group across social networks and how they might be linked to, you know, trade networks or other activities that those people were involved in, including, for example, religious activities. But yes, you're absolutely right. So this study, which was huge, went back tens of thousands of years.
And what they see is that until about 4,500 BC, so let me get my dates right, let's say 6,500 years ago.
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Chapter 6: How did ancient DNA transform our understanding of prehistoric diseases?
I mean, it was really... there was a real peak of violence there, at least in parts of Europe. So, yes, the question is, you know, how do these things fit together in time?
Now, there are some of these archaeologists and geneticists who've been working on this prehistoric plague who are fairly convinced that they don't yet have the evidence, but they say they will have very soon, that the plague was the cause of the Neolithic decline. And of course, there's this gray area because we don't think we've got the earliest cases of it.
So we don't think we've got the full picture. But there's another school of thought that, no, it was already happening beforehand. And the genuine underlying cause was the climate change, the agricultural crisis. And maybe it was just exacerbated by the plague that came in.
Or maybe the Yamnaya brought the plague in or the very lethal, contagious strains of the plague, which basically just finished off these communities that were already in dire straits. And some of them had even died. abandoned their settlements or just vanished.
Who had potentially also been suffering from, as of yet, an invisible disease that we don't know about. Yes, exactly. It's so fascinating.
And it sounds like, from what you're saying from just then, that this is just the beginning, that with more research into the DNA, microbe DNA, and more samples taken from across Eurasia, from across Europe, that we are now going to start learning more and more about just how important plague was in our prehistoric human story.
Yeah, totally. And even, you know, making major new findings about the historical period. So we were talking about the migration period, the barbarian invasions after the fall of the Roman Empire. And, you know, fairly recently, the geneticists have found smallpox in Viking populations who were moving about all over Europe at that time, spreading it around.
And that's way before we thought it was a major problem. Smallpox is one of the most lethal diseases known to man. It's thought to have killed upwards of 300 million people in the 20th century alone. Of course, it was eradicated or declared eradicated in 1980. But it's absolutely lethal, and so knowing when it began would be interesting.
There's the famous case of Ramses V, the young pharaoh, who's thought to have died of it because a mummy, again, and there's evidence of the blisters, the smallpox marks on his body. But I don't think his DNA has been tested yet, so that remains to be determined with certainty that he had smallpox. And he died more than 3,000 years ago. So this is a story in progress. The dates are changing.
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