Science Alert August 6, 2022
The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was involved in some of the most destructive historical pandemics circulated across Eurasia at least from the onset of the 3rd millennium BCE but the challenging preservation of ancient DNA in warmer climates has restricted evidence from culturally prominent regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean is currently lacking. An international team of researchers (Germany, Greece, USA – Temple University) presented genetic evidence for the presence of Y. pestis and Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid/enteric fever, from this period of transformation in Crete, detected at the cave site Hagios Charalambos. They reconstructed one Y. pestis genome that forms part of a now-extinct lineage of Y. pestis strains from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age that were likely not yet adapted for transmission via fleas. Furthermore, they reconstructed two ancient S. enterica genomes from the Para C lineage, which cluster with contemporary strains that were likely not yet fully host adapted to humans. The occurrence of these two virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Scatter plot of first two principal components and summary qpAdm models and estimated coefficients… Credit: Current Biology, July 25, 2022Â