The discovery of plague DNA in a 4,000-year-old sheep bone is rewriting the story of one of humanity’s most feared pathogens, revealing that the disease’s early spread depended on animals long before ...

In the very heart of the ancient lands of Eurasia, a major scientific discovery has shed new light on one of the oldest and most lethal diseases in human history. For the first time in history, ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: If the recent COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that pestilence is an inevitable part of being human. Littered throughout the pages of ...

Long before the Black Death killed millions across Europe in the Middle Ages, an earlier, more elusive version of the plague spread across much of Eurasia. For years, scientists were unsure how the ...

A mysterious form of plague that spread across Eurasia thousands of years before the Black Death has finally revealed a crucial clue. Scientists analyzing ancient DNA discovered the bacterium Yersinia ...

So large was the death toll and so great was the danger of contagion that funerary customs were disrupted. People fled cities. All this was true of covid-19. It was also true of the Black Death. As ...