Info from:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57658859
The burial of a young(ish) man who died around 3300BC was found in the Baltic region (Latvia) and analysed to show evidence of the plague bacterium. What makes this interesting is the questions this raises, some of which are touched on in the linked article. Some of these hypotheses are contradictory (plague caused massive population decline at end of Neolithic versus plague spread widely but had little impact).
All one can say with certainty is that plague appears not to have been either widespread, highly contagious person to person, or endemic in the Neolithic - otherwise the other two burials found with the affected man would likely also had carried signs of plague. Diseases can change over time, evolving like other organisms. Similarly the effects of the same disease can be different over time and differing human populations. This finding therefore raises more questions than providing answers.
What it does do, though, is point to the antiquity of human infection by the Y. pestis bacterium. The time span involved makes it highly likely that the so-called 'Justinian Plague' of the early sixth century was indeed Y. pestis and not some unspecified 'pestilence' (remember, historic terminology is notoriously vague, and 'plague' was a catch-all for lots of infectious, quickly moving diseases). We may even go back further in time and assume that the unspecified Athenian plague in the fifth century BC might have been Y. pestis. Such 'waves' of plagues would give us a chronology of major episodes roughly every 800 years for the pre-modern period (Athenian Plague 430 BC, Justinian 540s AD, medieval 1347-51), with only the last known plague pandemic (commenced 1850s) coming at a shorter interval, likely due to faster and increased trade and travel networks in modern times.
3 July 2021