{"id":11138,"date":"2025-12-30T22:05:29","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T04:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=11138"},"modified":"2025-12-30T22:05:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T04:05:31","slug":"dna-study-reveals-carrier-of-worlds-earliest-known-plague","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/12\/30\/dna-study-reveals-carrier-of-worlds-earliest-known-plague\/","title":{"rendered":"DNA Study Reveals Carrier of World&#8217;s Earliest-Known Plague"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/dna-study-reveals-carrier-of-worlds-earliest-known-plague\">Science Alert<\/a> A plague that swept through Eurasia for 2,000 years \u2013 millennia before the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/ancient-dna-evidence-reveals-where-the-black-death-most-likely-originated\">Black Death<\/a>&nbsp;of the Middle Ages \u2013 has only ever been detected in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/scientists-have-discovered-the-earliest-evidence-of-plague-in-a-neolithic-graveyard\">human remains<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/how-dust-may-have-determined-the-spread-of-ancient-human-civilisations\">Fertile Crescent<\/a>&nbsp;in the Middle East across Eurasia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such ancient samples of animal DNA are&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1098\/rstb.2019.0569\">never fully intact<\/a>, usually quite fragmented, and very contaminated with the leftovers of organisms that inhabited the animal&#8217;s body in life, and long after death.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Science Alert A plague that swept through Eurasia for 2,000 years \u2013 millennia before the&nbsp;Black Death&nbsp;of the Middle Ages \u2013 has only ever been detected in&nbsp;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-plague"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11139,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11138\/revisions\/11139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}