Our Oldest Enemy: A 5,500-Year-Old Plague Outbreak in Siberia

DNA from 5,500-year-old Siberian graves is the oldest plague outbreak ever found, not just a single case.

Plague turned up in 18 of 46 bodies — a higher hit rate than some medieval mass graves.

Victims were strikingly young, with siblings aged 8 to 12 buried together.

This strain spread person-to-person through the lungs, long before fleas became the carrier.

It carried a virulence gene, a superantigen, missing from the Black Death strains that came later.