Two weeks ago, Pooja Swali from the Crick Institute announced the discovery of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, in the dental pulp of three people who died about 4,000 years ago – two in Somerset and the other in Cumbria. This finding is astonishing in its own right because it pushes back the earliest evidence of plague in England by several millennia. But the discovery may also help to solve one of our greatest prehistoric mysteries: why did the people who introduced farming to the British Isles suddenly vanish shortly after they built Stonehenge some five millennia ago?
Before last month’s announcement, the oldest evidence of plague in Britain came from a 1,500-year-old skeleton interred at an Anglo-Saxon burial site near Cambridge. That victim died during the plague of Justinian, which spread throughout the eastern Roman empire and beyond in the middle of the sixth century. While scientists have identified plague DNA in human remains across Europe and Asia dating to between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago, until last week, we couldn’t be sure that this prehistoric pandemic reached these isles. It’s now clear that it did.
