Science Alert A plague that swept through Eurasia for 2,000 years – millennia before the Black Death of the Middle Ages – has only ever been detected in human remains, until now. For decades, it has been unclear how the Bronze Age plague spread so widely, but now we know which animal was a likely carrier.
A team of archaeologists sifted through scraps of DNA in the bones and teeth of Bronze Age cattle, goats, and sheep, as part of a large, ongoing study to track how these animals migrated, alongside humans, from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East across Eurasia.
Such ancient samples of animal DNA are never fully intact, usually quite fragmented, and very contaminated with the leftovers of organisms that inhabited the animal’s body in life, and long after death.