A 4,000-year-old sheep reveals the secret of an ancient plague

🤖AI Özeti

Scientists have uncovered a significant clue about an ancient form of plague that predates the Black Death by thousands of years. The bacterium Yersinia pestis was found in a 4,000-year-old domesticated sheep from a Bronze Age site in the Ural Mountains, marking the first discovery of this pathogen in a non-human host from that time. This finding raises questions about how this early strain spread, as it did not rely on fleas for transmission like its medieval counterpart.