Long before cities appeared, before fields were cleared for crops and before people began living in permanent villages, communities around Lake Baikal in Siberia were moving through a landscape shaped by hunting, fishing and seasonal rhythms. For years, archaeologists studying ancient burials in the region were puzzled by something unusual. Certain cemeteries contained unexpectedly high numbers of children and large graves that appeared to have been used only once. The pattern felt different from ordinary mortality. Now, evidence recovered from ancient DNA suggests those graves may preserve the earliest known traces of plague ever identified. The finding pushes the history of the disease further back in time and raises new questions about how deadly infections spread among prehistoric populations.
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