The Prehistoric Plague

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Ancients – "The Prehistoric Plague"

Host: Tristan Hughes
Guest: Laura Spinney, science journalist & author
Date: May 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into new scientific discoveries reshaping our understanding of epidemic disease in prehistory—especially the spread of plague (Yersinia pestis) thousands of years before historical records. Host Tristan Hughes and science writer Laura Spinney explore how ancient DNA is revealing the shadowy presence of devastating diseases in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, possibly influencing the rise and fall of ancient European societies and even reshaping languages and cultures that survive today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Origins and Nature of Plague

• Ancient DNA has rewound the clock on plague, showing Y. pestis existed over 5,000 years ago—much earlier than the first recorded outbreaks like the Justinian Plague (541 AD).
• The classic symptoms and forms—bubonic, septicemic, pneumonic—are all caused by Y. pestis, but how the disease presented and spread in prehistory may have differed.

Notable Quote

"Infectious disease has been the loudest silence in the archaeological record."
— Laura Spinney (03:29), quoting anthropologist James C. Scott

Farming, Settlement, and Crowds: Disease Breeding Grounds

• The domestication of animals and formation of larger, permanent settlements after the invention of farming created the "perfect laboratory" for zoonotic diseases to jump from animals to humans.
• Close human-animal proximity enabled microbes to evolve and infect new hosts.

Notable Quote

"Farming created the perfect laboratory for these disease pathogens to do that."
— Laura Spinney (09:58)

Ancient DNA Revolution

• For decades, lack of written records and the rarity of physical marks on bones left ancient pandemics invisible.
• New techniques extract and distinguish both human and microbial DNA from ancient bones, especially teeth and dense skull bones (petrous bone).
• These methods can now track both human migrations and disease spread in tandem.

Notable Quote

"This ability to extract DNA from skeletons from teeth has really transformed our whole understanding of the role of infectious disease in the human past."
— Laura Spinney (07:57)

The Prehistoric Plague: Timeline and Spread

• Recent collaborative research led by the University of Copenhagen has identified a surge in deadly microbes (including plague) around 5,000 years ago across Eurasia.
• DNA evidence shows earlier, low-level presence of pathogens, with a pronounced spike in deadly diseases (like Y. pestis) paralleling the arrival of peoples from the Eurasian Steppe.

Notable Quote

"This study, which was huge, went back tens of thousands of years [...] until about 6500 years ago, the microbes present in the teeth are essentially what you would find in the oral microbiome [...] about 5,000 years ago, so about 3,000 BC, those surge, so you get a massive peak."
— Laura Spinney (23:20, 24:25)

The Yamnaya Expansion and Disease

• The Yamnaya, steppe herders with large mobile herds, lived in close proximity to animals—creating environments for disease evolution.
• These nomadic groups may have had partial immunity to new strains; such immunity, or lack thereof, played a critical role in disease impact on resident populations.
• Plague DNA is found in both Yamnaya and local farming populations across Eurasia—indicating widespread but variable spread.

Notable Quotes

"They were the first people to perfect the lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism in the steppe [...] they were in a particularly intense relationship with these microbes."
— Laura Spinney (29:24)

"One of the ideas is that when the Yamnaya come into Europe, they have at least partial immunity to diseases that the farmers don't."
— Laura Spinney (31:07)

How Did Plague Kill in Prehistory?

• The prehistoric strain of Y. pestis lacked the flea-associated transmission gene—implying the disease likely did not spread via rat fleas as in later outbreaks, but possibly through direct contact, undercooked meat, or other routes.

Notable Quote

"The ancient form of plague, from the LNBA plague... lacked a genetic variant which allowed it to survive in the flea stomach, which means that it probably didn't spread by flea bites."
— Laura Spinney (33:47)

Other Epidemic Pathogens: More Than Just Plague

• Around the same period, new diseases like relapsing fever (Borrelia recurrentis) also emerge in the DNA record, possibly enabled by shifts like the adoption of wool clothing.
• The intertwined story of human culture (e.g., textile and livestock practices) and disease evolution is a new frontier.

Notable Quote

"That's a really nice example of how human behaviors and human cultural changes and diseases can interact and shape each other."
— Laura Spinney (37:49)

Rethinking Migrations and Collapses

• The genetic turnover in Europe 5,000 years ago was once attributed mainly to violent invasions. Now, disease and demographic collapse are equally plausible or even dominant explanations.
• Archaeological evidence shows signs of agricultural crisis, cooling climate, and increased violence before Yamnaya arrival—suggesting a complex interplay of factors, possibly with epidemic disease as a major driver of "Neolithic collapse" and paving the way for new peoples, cultures, and languages.

Notable Quote

"Pandemics might have been one contributing factor. If they cleared whole swathes of European land and then the people came in and resettled."
— Laura Spinney (39:56)

Impacts and Legacy Through to Modern Times

• The conversation draws parallels between ancient and modern pandemics, emphasizing how each new DNA finding rewrites our understanding of prehistory—and even history, as with evidence of smallpox in Viking-era remains.
• Infectious disease, once invisible, is now seen as a transformative force in human cultures, possibly shaping language, religion, and even the course of civilizations.

Notable Quote

"We need to start to think about diseases as a major historical force."
— Laura Spinney (49:31)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes with Timestamps

• 03:29 — "Infectious disease has been the loudest silence in the archaeological record." — Laura Spinney
• 09:58 — "Farming created the perfect laboratory for these disease pathogens to do that." — Laura Spinney
• 24:25 — "About 5,000 years ago, so about 3,000 BC, those [dangerous microbes] surge, so you get a massive peak." — Laura Spinney
• 33:47 — "It lacked a genetic variant which allowed it to survive in the flea stomach, which means that it probably didn't spread by flea bites." — Laura Spinney
• 37:49 — "That's a really nice example, I think, of how human behaviors and human cultural changes and diseases can interact and shape each other." — Laura Spinney
• 39:56 — "Pandemics might have been one contributing factor. If they cleared whole swathes of European land and then the people came in and resettled." — Laura Spinney
• 49:31 — "We need to start to think about diseases as a major historical force." — Laura Spinney

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Important Timestamps for Deep Dives

• The Nature of Plague & Prehistory – 04:19 to 07:57
• Emergence of Prehistoric Plague Evidenced by DNA – 17:35 to 23:20
• Yamnaya Expansion, Migratory Surfing, and Disease – 29:20 to 32:49
• Plague Transmission Differences in Prehistory – 33:47 to 35:04
• Links between Disease, Wool, and Human Culture – 35:54 to 38:20
• Reinterpreting Neolithic Collapse (Violence vs. Disease) – 39:56 to 45:16
• Smallpox in Prehistoric Populations and the Power of Disease – 47:51 to 49:31

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Concluding Thoughts

This episode powerfully argues that epidemic disease, long overlooked, was a transformative force in prehistory as fundamental as farming, metallurgy, or language. New technology is revealing how invisible pandemics shaped the fate of communities, migrations, and even entire civilizations—including the linguistic heritage of modern Europe.

As Laura Spinney puts it (49:31):

"We need to start to think about diseases as a major historical force."

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(For listeners interested in ancient history, DNA, and the untold story of epidemic disease, this episode of The Ancients is a must-listen.)

Transcript

[Tristan Hughes]

Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Tristan Hughes]

The Plague Yersinia pestis, the most feared disease in human history, responsible for the horrific deaths of hundreds of millions of people across millennia. Now, the first historically recorded plague outbreak, the Justinian plague, began in 541 AD. But new evidence has revealed something startling. Ancient DNA studies have discovered traces of Yersinia pestis dating back more than 5,000 years ago, proof that this disease was already devastating Eurasia in the late Neolithic, the late Stone age period, nearly 3,500 years earlier than the first recorded plague. So where did it come from? What was happening in Eurasia 5,000 years ago that sparked this outbreak? Could this plague have triggered a Neolithic collapse, a Stone Age collapse, and signalled the dawn of the Bronze Age in Europe? Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host and today we are telling the story of this prehistoric plague. Our guest is the science journalist and author Laura Spinney.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Laura, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

[Laura Spinney]

It's a pleasure to be here and

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

it is good to see you in person. We've done two episodes in the past on Proto Indo European and the origins of mythology. First time that we've done it face to Face, though. And for prehistoric plagues, I mean, what a topic is this? This is a great. Another great topic where science is now revealing this hidden but incredibly important part of the prehistory of humans.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah, it totally is. It's very, very exciting right now because obviously from historical records, we know about epidemics and pandemics that have, you know, devastated humanity and changed the course of history. But historical records only go back 5,000 years or so. So now we have the tools to look before that. And so, you know, historians and prehistorians have long suspected that disease had a hand in shaping populations and shaping history. And there's the famous quote that I love from the anthropologist James C. Scott, who says, you know, infectious disease has been the loudest silence in the archaeological record. He was thinking particularly of the Neolithic period, so about 10,000 years ago. But that sort of goes across the board, and that's now changing because we don't have to rely on written records anymore.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So has there always been a hunch or for some time that was there a big prehistoric plague or prehistoric plagues that would have ravaged places like Europe, as you say, during the Neolithic period, the Stone Age period, several thousand years ago.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So there was always this. There has long been this idea that many of the infectious diseases which were scourges of humanity for a long time, some of them still are today. But anyway, from history we know that they were, such as plague being the most famous one, probably. So the idea was that they probably became major problems around the invention of farming. So around 12,000, 10,000 years ago. Because the idea is that with the invention of farming, new forms of producing food, population started to grow, and then people were living together in bigger sort of centers of population. Not quite cities at the beginning, but later on. Yes. And therefore they were living more densely, and this was sort of the perfect breeding ground for contagious diseases, also known as crowd diseases, for that reason. And so that the idea was that they got their foothold then and it was a good idea and it had a lot of, you know, it made sense. But it's being challenged by now that the evidence that is coming to light mainly with ancient DNA.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So let's highlight this importance of kind of close connection with animals and how that might well have been a key part of this story. Because when we talk about plague, what exactly do we mean? What disease are we talking about when we say the word plague?

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah, it's a very good question because plague has become sort of generalized, hasn't it? And I think it's a kind of measure of how devastating and terrifying this particular disease was in history. That sort of everything got cooled by that one label. But when we talk about plague as a specific disease, we tend to mean bubonic plague. There are other varieties of the same disease that is caused by the same microbe, the same bacterium that is Yersinia pestis, Y Pestis for short. But bubonic plague, you know, this horrible disease where it starts out with fever and headache and then you start to develop these buboes, swellings of the lymph nodes. And before antibiotics, it was, you know, almost certainly lethal. And there are two main varieties of that disease that we know about from history and also from, you know, places where we get cases today because we still get cases of plague today. Septicemic form, so in the blood and the mnemonic form. So that's the lungs that are affected. And it's considered the sort of the most dangerous because it's transmitted on the air, on the breath, so coughs and droplets that come out when you cough and sneeze. And so very highly contagious form of the disease and just as lethal, but spreads faster for that reason. So that's the disease we're talking about. It's the one responsible. We now know, again, thanks to Adna, definitely, for the Black Death of the mid14th century. And the plague of London, the one that devastated London in the 1700s, was

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

it 1666, near the Great fire?

[Laura Spinney]

Exactly, exactly. A happy time for Londoners. But yes. So, and it's only about 15 years that we've been able to prove definitively that why Pestis caused the Black Death. Because if you think about it, most of the evidence we have for death in the past is cemeteries. Also historical records. But again, historical records are not always available. But when you look in cemeteries of very or very old cemeteries, what you're looking at is bone material. There's obviously no soft tissue left. And generally speaking, infectious diseases don't leave a mark. It's quite rare that they leave a mark on bones. So, you know, you've got no evidence, really, unless, you know, that's why mummies have been such a valuable source of information about infectious diseases in the great past, because you do have the soft tissue preserved in a mummy, but obviously they're not that numerous. So the ability to extract DNA from skeletons from teeth has really transformed our whole understanding of the role of infectious disease in the human past.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

And can you explain the role of animals in the spread of this disease? Why do we Also call it a zoonotic pathogen.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So this goes back to the idea that farming was the point at which the invention of farming was the point at which many of these diseases crossed the species barrier. And the idea is that they were animal diseases originally. We know that because often many of these diseases, including plague, still have animal reservoirs. So if there's no humans around, or even if there are, they may also infect animals populations. And the idea is that when farming was being developed, people started to live more closely with the animals they had domesticated. And therefore there was the perfect sort of petri dish, if you like to use a laboratory term, for the microbe to experiment jumping into humans. And probably most attempts would have failed because you've got to have the right mutations to be able to infect the cells of a different species. But you know, it's got this constant, it's got this long capacity to keep experimenting. And of course microbes reproduce very quick. So it doesn't really matter if one doesn't work. Going to keep trying with different generations, different mutations. Eventually one might take in the new host and you know, you might get a little, just one case, you might get a tiny little outbreak, might fizzle out. But if, you know this is natural selection in action in a microbe, if the virus or bacterium is able to reproduce more of itself in the new host, then it'll have an advantage and it will become adapted to that new host and it will change genetically, evolve to acquire adaptations to that new host, may even become specialized to that new host, although it may also keep the animal host. Anyway, this is evolution and how diseases adapt to new hosts. And the idea is that farming created the perfect laboratory for these disease pathogens to do that.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Perfect laboratory. And then that next stage which you mentioned, like the spreading via breath, if we also think with the invention of farming soon after, you think of the inventions of the first cities or the lots of people close together in larger communities. So all of a sudden then you have that next stage right after where that disease could spread to other people.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. And James C. Scott, the American anthropologist, I was referring to his idea. I think he was writing certainly before this adna ancient DNA evidence became available, but he was sort of saying, you know, when we see in the archaeological record a sudden collapse of an early city or town, you know, it might be civil war, it might be that, but often it's very localized to the one settlement. And he was speculating that maybe it would have been a local epidemic, that we just simply don't have any evidence for. And now we at least have that capacity to go and look back and see what role it played.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

I know you've done a lot of work on more recent pandemics, like the Spanish flu and the like. How can studying more recent pandemics actually be useful when going back into prehistoric times and trying to learn more about what an epidemic might have looked like back then?

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So if you think back to Covid, not that long ago, although it seems a long time, doesn't it?

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

It does, I know. Yes, very much.

[Laura Spinney]

You remember that everybody. Well, lots of people learned the word epidemiology for the first time. And we learned about these people whose job it was to basically track the evolution of the virus and even predict what might be the next strain that came out and try and get ahead of the game and, you know, start testing for it and perhaps even once the vaccine came online, start to modify the vaccine to be able to cope with new strains. And so that was a lot of the scientific work that went into that pandemic. Well, that's essentially what is happening all the time in microbes. It's branching, creating new strains. Some of them don't work, so they fizzle out. Some of them do. So they replace all the other ones that were there before, and then they start again and branch and create a new tree. And so we can watch that in action in a pandemic that we live through with the tools that we have today, and we can know that that was happening also in the past. There are many more people alive today. We travel much faster. We're much more connected. So perhaps the timings and the capacity for the virus to spread are greater today. But then we also have drugs. We also have, you know, we understand how to stop it to some extent, too. They didn't have in the past. I mean, if you think about those very first epidemics in the earliest cities, they must have been absolutely terrifying.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Well, the plague of Athens, which is mentioned in classical times, and Thucydides mentions just how devastating it was.

[Laura Spinney]

Bodies piling up in the temples and, you know, because of course, there were no antibiotics. Of course there were no. There was no treatment of any kind. They may have had some sense of keeping the infected separate from the uninfected, because quarantine is quite an old idea, and even animals understand about isolating sick ones from the healthy herd or group to some extent. But of course, they wouldn't have known what they were dealing with, and they would have had a completely different concept of disease as well, which is an interesting aspect of the story. It would have been an act of God. It would have been punishment for sins. And so they would have been absolutely devastating and terrifying.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

As you mentioned, trying to find evidence of this in prehistoric times has been notoriously hard for so long. But you mentioned it earlier, DNA. So how can DNA and how can the studying of bones, what signs do they give that may indicate to a scientist today that person died of the plague or something similar?

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So just to backpedal a tiny bit on ancient DNA, because for a very long time, people thought it would be impossible to extract DNA from ancient human remains and analyze it in any meaningful way. Meaning, mainly because of the problem of contamination. Right. So if you or I are allowed privileged enough to touch a bone in a museum, we immediately contaminate it with our DNA. Now, you won't be able to do that today, probably, but in the past it happened all the time. There's very few bones in our museums that haven't been handled by scientists of earlier times. And so it was thought to be a dead loss, that it wouldn't be possible. And then scientists worked out how to basically sift the ancient DNA from the modern DNA, because ancient DNA has a. Generally, it's a different profile because it's been around longer and it's more degraded, and that fact is helpful in separating it out. And then they have all sorts of clever tricks where they can fill in the gaps and so on. So we can now read ancient DNA. It's never perfect. It's not perfect, but it does. It is a huge new source of information now since scientists started tracking humans using this new tool, because now that you can extract DNA from ancient remains, you can take it out of these people who are in this cemetery here, say, at this one end of Europe, take it from people who are buried at the other end of Europe at roughly the same time, and then you can learn all sorts of stuff about who moved where, how they were related, what trade networks they were part of, what they're marrying, marital customs were, and so on. But what the scientists also realized, let's say about 15 years ago, probably now, was that along with the 18 DNA came the DNA of the microbes with which the people were infected. So that was a sort of serendipitous discovery, but now it's pretty much a routine thing that people are going to go looking for what microbes were infecting people as well as the human DNA in those human remains, and try and piece together the history of disease as well. As the history of humans,

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[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

That kind of brings us nicely into this groundbreaking new study. I'll also mention that other big historic case and I feel we should mention of plague, isn't it? So you've got the Black Death, you've got the London plague. You've also got the plague of Justinian, which is the earliest known recorded evidence of what we think is Yersinia pestis of what we think is the plague historically.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So people talk now about three global three plague pandemics. So the first one is the one that starts with the plague of Justinian in the sort of Mediterranean basin in the near east mostly. It's thought to have started in Constantinople. Yeah. 6th century when Justinian was on and was the emperor in Constantinople. And that goes on till the Middle Ages. And then the second one is the one that starts with the Black death in the 14th century and goes all the way up to the 19th century. And then the third plague pandemic starts in the 19th century and goes on into the 20th.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Oh, right. Oh, okay. So the London one in the 17th century is just a. Well, it's an epidemic Isn't it? Rather than the pandemic.

[Laura Spinney]

So that's part of the second plague. Because you can see, plague is something that stays around for ages and sort of it can be endemic in an area and then it can, you know, flare up from time to time. So that's the way people think about it now. And it's to do with incubation times, spread times, how long it can stay in an animal reservoir, go back into the animal reservoir, come back into humans. But yes, that's the way that we categorize it now.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Okay, thank you for explaining. But now, back into prehistoric times, then. But it was important because once again, highlighting how long play can stay around, and surely that would be the same in prehistoric times as well. Now, you mentioned before we went on that tangent, the large area and how much you can learn from remains across a large geographic context. So how far back in time are we going with this groundbreaking research with this prehistoric plague, and how large an area are we talking about?

[Laura Spinney]

So if I go back to the plague of Justinian, right, the 540s AD CE, as we should say now, that was a fascinating time in Europe because it was just after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And you've got people moving around. Of course, it's your area, your time period, moving around Europe in large numbers and carrying whatever diseases they have with them. So it's a time when there are epidemics and it's not that surprising that there were these outbreaks. But what's happened in the last 10 or so years is that people have realized that plague has been around a lot longer, going back into prehistory. And now talking about what has the catchy name, the Late Neolithic Bronze Age plague. Because we have, we have a naming problem, obviously, if the one.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Okay, right.

[Laura Spinney]

Lmba plague. I mean, yeah, so, you know, the, the Justinian plague is said to have started the first plague pandemic. So now, if you discover one earlier, what are you going to call it? Yes, you have a naming problem, but essentially we have one that is ravaging Europe around 5,000 years ago. It's not the first cases, but there is a surge around then again, it probably was quite drawn out in time, but yeah, so they're calling it Late Neolithic Bronze Age. And that is also a hint to some of the questions that are being asked around it, because it's basically the end of the Neolithic, the end of the period when farmers dominate in Europe and elsewhere and the Bronze Age comes in, you know, which Homer sings about a much different society Much more warlike, much more hierarchical, initiated by the arrival of nomadic peoples from the steppe in Europe, and essentially the foundations of European civilization as we know it.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Okay, we're going to delve into all of that because you think of Bronze Age collapse, you don't think as much about a Stone Age Neolithic collapse, but we'll explore that as well. But tell us about what study this was. What was this research led at the University of Copenhagen, if I'm not mistaken.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah, well, it's a huge collaboration. Many, many groups across the world have been collaborating to this work. But the University of Copenhagen, in a way, has taken the lead because it was the first one to really realize, as I said earlier, that, you know, it's worth extracting the microbial DNA as well as the human DNA, because you can learn it's a whole nother source of information. So they've been doing that on a routine basis. So they tend to take. The petrus bone is a good source of DNA, which is a bit of bone in the skull near the ear. It's very, very dense. Another good source, a very good source is teeth, because in life, teeth have their own blood supply. And so the microbes get caught in the blood that goes through the teeth and get preserved there. So you can drill into the teeth, into the cementum, and you can, if you're lucky, and if the person was infected at the time of death, extract the DNA of the microbes that were infecting them, assuming those microbes entered their blood, which is not always the case,

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

but that also it highlights that the remains that were used in this project would have largely been skeletons. It would have been like the mandible. It would have been the petrous bone in the ear, because those are the best ones for preserving DNA, not just to themselves, but also of the microbes. And just so I can get my head around it as well, how can we distinguish between microbe DNA and the human's personal DNA?

[Laura Spinney]

So I guess that they will be pulling it all out together, but then they can distinguish it with their clever techniques because, you know, the genomes of the human and of the microbe will be very different sizes and have very different profiles. So it's quite easy to distinguish.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Right. Thank you for the science. So you've got the evidence of plagues from 5,000 years ago, which we'll get to. But I'd also like to ask, because this seems like a big project where they also analyze remains older than 5,000 years ago.

[Laura Spinney]

Yes.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So in those ones, did they find any Examples of microbes at all.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So just to say also that because you've got the human evidence as well, you can say things. For example, you've got radiocarbon dating. So you can say, for example, how old a cemetery is, you know, when people were buried there. You can also say whether they're related to each other. And then you can look at the diseases that infected them. So you can see how those diseases were spreading in the group across social networks and how they might be linked to, you know, trade networks or other activities that those people were involved in, including, for example, religious activities. But yes, you're absolutely right. So this study, which was huge, went back tens of thousands of years, and what they see is that until about 4500 BC. So let me get my dates right. Let's say 6500 years ago, the microbes present in the teeth are essentially what you would find in the oral microbiome. So, as you know, our mouths are full of bacteria, most of them neutral, some of them beneficial, and they just live there, you know, with us, symbiotically, and they help us digest our food and it's normal.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So no deadly microbes before that time,

[Laura Spinney]

no deadly microbes at that date. They start to detect deadly and dangerous microbes causing causative agents of infectious disease, but at low levels. And what happens is that about 5,000 years ago, so about 3,000 BC, those surge, so you get a massive peak. So already from this study and other studies which have shown similar things, you've got evidence that is throwing doubt on the idea that all these diseases were present from the time of the farming revolution, because that was much earlier. So what is this surge at 5,000 years all about? Well, we know from archaeology that that is when these people come in from the east, from the steppe, the first arrivals. Before we get into the details of that, I would just like to say up front that the timing is not precise enough for us to be able to say yet whether they brought it, whether they walked into it, whether they came for other reasons, picked up strains en route from people who they engaged with, and then perhaps having superior immunity for other reasons, we were able to survive at least some of them, those infections, and then they carried them further on. So it's not necessarily that they were bringing them, although it could be that's also to be determined.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

I'd like to ask, though, about between the 6,500 years and the 5,000 years ago, where you see that big spike, but does that indicate that the origins of that leap between animals and humans for the plague. That the origins of the plague could have been some 6500 years ago. And in those 1500 years, it starts to get more deadly.

[Laura Spinney]

Deadly is a very difficult and interesting question. What nature the disease actually took back then and how similar it was to the diseases we know it today, for example, or as we know it from historical records is a good question. And there's no guarantee that it would have been the same. Okay, so diseases evolve, their genetic makeup evolves and that also changes the way that they manifest. So one idea is that these diseases got a foothold in large, dense settlements. The first ones to form about 4,500 BC, before the Nomads come to town. And no towns yet, of course, but in these great big mega settlements, I think we might have mentioned them before by this culture called Tripilia that is centered on Ukraine. And these very mysterious, troubling, troubling because we can't explain them and because we have no burials from them. So we have very little information. But we know that there were these great big settlements, thousands and thousands of people, bigger than any settlement that existed before, centered on Ukraine. And if people were living densely there, and we don't know that for sure, we don't know even if they were inhabited all year round, for example, they might have been religious gathering areas for seasonal or for annual gatherings or something like that, but they could have been inhabited all the time. And the idea is that, you know, the disease may have got a foothold there, spread through trade networks, and then somehow when other people came in, they spread them around, or there was some other reason why it spread and took on a peak, reached a peak later on. But the initiation of it was in

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

those settlements and the remains that have those microbes from 6,500 years ago, which might be as a cause of that I know speculation at the moment, were they found in areas around Eastern Europe? You mentioned that there are no burials from Tripilli that survived. But the ones with those earliest cases of the plague, were they still in that rough area of central Eastern Europe?

[Laura Spinney]

Well, this is what's troubling. So we know that even before the Yamnaya head west, and by the way, they also headed east, that there were a couple of cases, for example, in Orkney.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Okay, interesting. So that's really far away from.

[Laura Spinney]

It's really far away. And we know that there were some cases in a multi generational family of farmers in Sweden round about the time that the Amnay arrived, but probably before they had any contact with them. Or certainly before they started interbreeding with them and the population started mixing. So that's a bit off as well if the Yamnaya are supposed to have brought it. And another piece of evidence is that we know that plague was killing hunter gatherers in Siberia. So way east of the point of departure of the Yamnaya, who left from sort of close to the northern shore of the Black Sea before the Yamnaya emerge or spread. So I suppose the converging consensus now is that plague was pretty much ubiquitous. It was all over. But it may not have been highly contagious yet. The strains that were around then might have been just like causing very localized outbreaks, lethal outbreaks, probably, but localized, that didn't spread through populations. That's another possibility.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So it seems to be there at the time, but there's no big wave until.

[Laura Spinney]

Until.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Who are these people known as the Yamnaya and what were they doing 5,000 years ago?

[Laura Spinney]

So Yamnaya is, is the name that Russian archaeologists gave to this culture, this identity, I suppose, package, archaeological package of behaviors, material remains that they think have form a unity. And it means pit grave, because that's the way that those people buried their dead in a pit grave under a burial mound in the steppe. You still see them today. They're pretty much the only landmarks. And they were the first people to perfect the lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism in the steppe, which meant that they could stay in the steppe, an extremely hostile environment, all year round, moving around in a sort of circle with the seasons, with their herds to new pastures and trying to find water sources. And they perfected that they were highly mobile, they moved around in wagons and they had big herds. And importantly, they lived in extremely close proximity to those herds. They were with them all day long, they practically slept with them. So they would have been in a particularly intense relationship with these microbes, doing their laboratory bit, making that experimental leap across species. It would have happened much more intensely in those people than it would have done in the farmers, who lived differently and kept the animals at a bit more of a distance and had smaller herds. We think so in the Amnaya, it would have been brutal to begin with, but perhaps, you know, small outbreaks and then over time, their immune systems would have adapted and become tempered like.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So that is the thing that the bacteria, even though it probably makes that leap, as mentioned, the laboratory setting, but over several generations, our human bodies can develop a natural immunity to that bacteria, right?

[Laura Spinney]

Exactly. And many of the adaptations we have today in our Genomes to infectious diseases were honed from that time on and even now have become damaging in a very different hygienic context. So, for example, multiple sclerosis is caused by a sort of overactive genetic variant of something that would initially evolve to protect us against those infectious diseases. So one of the ideas is that when the Yamnaya come into Europe, they have at least partial immunity to diseases that the farmers don't have immunity or have less immunity with. So there's this immune system advantage. And in fact, part of this huge new collaboration of research, different groups are doing different parts of it, but people are also looking at how the human immune system, how the genes that control the human immune system have adapted over time in a parallel course to the infectious agents. And try to understand, you know, how does the human adapting to the, to the bug, how is the bug adapting to the human? And cross references in time.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

The immunity that the yamnae, we believe they have, or partial immunity is to a particular. As of yet, we still don't know much about it. But a particular strand of Yersinia pestis of what we would call plague.

[Laura Spinney]

I don't think we have that detail yet, but we know that they had plague. Plague has been found in Yamnaya teeth.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Right. Okay.

[Laura Spinney]

And as I say, from that time on, it is a problem in Europe. It looks probably like fairly sizable and lethal outbreaks. Very hard to say, though, for example, how it spread at that time. So it's unethical to revive those very dangerous pathogens. So even if you've got the whole genome sequence, in theory, you could revive that germ. It's unethical to do it.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

It's quite dangerous as well, isn't it? Of course, if you don't actually have the immunity today for it, yes.

[Laura Spinney]

So the WHO says no, the World Health Organization says we don't do that. Unethical. And in fact, anyway, even if with some of these diseases you were to revive it and say, infect an animal, it might not, probably wouldn't work because many of these diseases became human specialized diseases. What I'm saying is that you can't make the disease work again in a living host and ask how it manifests. You can't do that. But what you can do is you can look at its genetic code and compare it to the genetic code of germs whose effects we do know, because either they're still present today or they have only been eradicated for a short period. And you can say, well, that gene variant is there. It's not there. So we can say things about how it's spread by comparing with the modern diseases and in plague. That's interesting because as you may know, plague these days often spreads by a bite from a rat flea. So the flea carries the bacterium, and when the flea bites a human, the bacterium is transferred to the human. But the ancient form of plague, from the LNBA plague, the one we're talking about, the late Neolithic bonsai, the prehistoric plague. Let's call it the prehistoric plague. It's much better. Yeah. It lacked a genetic variant which allowed it to survive in the flea stomach, which means that it probably didn't spread by flea bites.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

So the fleas are innocent in this story?

[Laura Spinney]

The fleas are innocent in this story. They're probably not innocent anyway. Fleas are never innocent. There are other ideas. Could it perhaps have been transferred on the breath from human to human? But we can't assume that there was human to human transfer. It possibly, for example, might have been spread at that time through undercooked meat, because we know that plague infects other animals and maybe their cooking hygiene wasn't what we require today in our restaurants. But if it was undercooked meat, probably it was just the people who ate that meat who would have been affected, and then you would have a very, very localized outbreak, which would have fizzled out quite quickly. So these are questions we don't have answers to yet, but obviously they change our understanding of how far epidemics might have had an impact.

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[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

When doing some research for this, I also found it interesting that. So one of the Yamnaya, one of their livestock, it's sheep. And is it correct that the yamnaya are the ones that really develop wool clothing and bring wool clothing west? So could actually be that you were wearing something. If they were trading woolen goods, that actually the farmers who bought these goods bartered or whatever, they actually were wearing something that could have given them this prehistoric form of plague.

[Laura Spinney]

So this is another story that's evolving. My understanding at this point in time is that the Yamnaya did not have sheep of the long haired variety that produced the wool that we are familiar with and that we knit into our jumpers and into my earrings, but their descendants did have so within them, a few hundred years, perhaps 500 years of their arrival, wool clothing was being worn in Europe for the first time. And there is an idea that certain diseases, one in particular being relapsing fever, which is pretty rare today, but it's a relative of Lyme disease and it's, as its name might suggest, it causes fever and headaches, intense headaches in repeating bouts, and that's caused by Borrelia recurrentis. The idea is that at some point around about the arrival of these nomads from the east or a little bit later, that bug adapted to this change in the human landscape, if you like, because it leapt from ticks, which infected animals previously, into the louse, the wool louse, the one that lives on the. Sorry, the body louse. Human body louse that lives on the human body and likes to nestle in nice warm wool. Right. And that after that, finding a nice new niche in this louse and in the human host for the disease, it became a human specialist.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Right.

[Laura Spinney]

So that's a really nice example, I think, of how human behaviors and human cultural changes and diseases can interact and shape each other.

[Jamie]

Yes.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Because we've been focusing on plague.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. But actually not the only one.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

It's not the only one. So you have also this one, Borrelia. I've got it on my notes here. Borrelia recurrentis as well. So yeah, yes, it's almost just you've got this wave with the Anaya probably, and then a little bit later you've also got this other pathogen arising to the fore, which the difficulties they must have faced is. Yeah, we're only just seeing the beginnings of it.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah, totally. And. But I think, you know, infectious disease was the main killer of humanity right up till the early 20th century, don't forget. So, yes, they would have been deadly and awful outbreaks. Nobody would have been able to help anyone else. Nobody would have had any immunity. Well, the definition in a way of an epidemic or a pandemic is something where you get this explosive incendiary outbreak because the people have no immune system to it. So that might mean that it's a new variant that they haven't been exposed to before or that it's an old variant that's come back after many generations, so the human immune memory for it is lost. Now, we did mention that the amnio might have some partial immunity. So we could be looking at a situation, could be. I mean, we don't know yet where the Amni bring a strain into, you know, a place where there are many farming settlements. Those farmers have no immunity to the particular strains that the Yamnaya bring, and so they die in much larger numbers. And then what happened? Perhaps the Yamnaya just took their lands and took over their herds, who knows? Or perhaps that Yamnaya saw an advantage because violence wasn't absent from that world and knocked off the last of the farmers and then proceeded to impose their own culture. You know, there are many permutations possible, and this is all the kinds of questions that are being asked now, because

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

that's interesting, because I think when someone says the Amnaya, the natural idea is that they come from the east, they go westwards and they start killing a lot of people. And it's quite violent, their takeover. But could a reason, actually a secret reason, behind that seeming violence of the Amnaya is maybe that. That other part.

[Laura Spinney]

That's a really, really, really important point, because when. When the geneticists first saw in the ancient DNA this massive turnover in the European gene pool about 5,000 years ago, which was their first clue that there had been big migrations from the east, first genetic clues, if you like, because we had archaeological evidence, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that it must have been violent. You can't get that kind of rapid turnover in the gene pool unless people are being slaughtered or, you know, women are being raped and you're imposing your genes on the next generation. But the explanation has been changed utterly in the last 10 years. And there may have been some violence, but nobody thinks, I would say it's fair to say that violence was the main mechanism. Pandemics might have been one contributing factor. If they cleared whole swathes of European land and then the people came in and resettled. There are all sorts of fascinating social explanations. So these nomads had very different social networks. They were used to being spread apart, separated for large periods of time over large periods of space, because that's what their life conducted them into. That's what they had to put up with in the step. And so they were very good at reinforcing their social networks over huge areas of space and time, reinforcing their identity. They did that through hospitality, through taking each other in wining and dining bards who told fabulous stories that everyone could remember because it was so fabulous. And all of this was part of their way of living that they brought to Europe at that time.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Is it Indo European language? Are they?

[Laura Spinney]

And Indo European languages, of course they

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

have a lasting impact on ancient Europe, or well, down to the present day.

[Laura Spinney]

They have a completely transformative impact.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

And to think that actually maybe disease was a key part of that.

[Laura Spinney]

There you go. It may have been a key part of the story that ushered in the Indo European languages, the languages that most Europeans speak today.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

And the remains that we have of people who have evidence of plague from 5,000 years ago, the prehistoric plague, I'm presuming they are not just Yamnaya remains. Do we find the evidence, like maybe as far west as France and Spain and Britain, you know, which seem to be evidence showing just how far and wide it spread?

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So you remember I said that we can't necessarily detect all cases of infectious disease because some diseases don't enter the blood. So, for example, that's the case with tb, generally speaking, it doesn't enter the blood and doesn't leave a mark on bones. So you're not gonna be able to detect TB from ancient DNA. And that's true for other diseases. And, you know, maybe a disease is gonna kill somebody without leaving any trace that we can detect. That's generally the case. So this sort of assumption of the geneticist is that we're only seeing the peak of the iceberg, that there would have been a lot more infectious disease around and probably earlier than they can detect it. Obviously, that's a fast moving field and it's getting pushed back a lot. So you can see this is a very sort of dynamic landscape at the moment. People are finding new cases. I mean, this finding of the surge at 5,000 years is very solid because it comes from studies that look across huge tens of thousands of years and large swathes of space, large parts of Eurasia. So they're kind of constructing a timeline of those infectious diseases. That's a fairly reliable finding. But say we were to find an individual case or a cluster of cases of plague in western France that were of the same strain that the Yamnaya brought, then you'd have to revise your thinking about how it got there and who brought it in initially. So it's very important to pay attention to the divergence of the genetic divergence between the strains that are affecting these different cases, because we may have had plague, for example, in Orkney.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

You mentioned that.

[Laura Spinney]

Yes, before the Yamnaya arrived. But was it the same strain and so on? That's the story that's being reconstructed at the moment. And that's why it's very difficult to say which is cause and which is effect. Possibly. I'd say the most convincing story at the moment is that plague was a major problem in Europe before the Yamnaya arrived. But they may have brought new strains, new changes of life that made it much bigger, a much bigger problem, much more present than with their huge herds. So whereas it may have not had a major impact on population numbers before, perhaps it does now, and perhaps now it becomes a major sculpting force in history or prehistory.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

There you go. I must ask about the end of the Stone Age, then the end of the Neolithic, and the potential impact there of, of this plague. So we think then some 3,000 BC or 2,500 around there. So that's almost 5,000 years ago. So kind of similar time you get the arrivals of these so called beaker people and this association with the early Bronze Age, as you mentioned earlier, with new people coming in to certain areas and taking over from the, the, from the local populations. Could it be that disease that the prehistoric plague or other diseases we simply don't know about right now, but may have been even more deadly, are actually one of, if not the main factor as to why these new populations come in at that time, that cause what maybe you could say is a Neolithic collapse.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah. So long before all of this work, we knew about a Neolithic collapse, Right. From archeology, starting about 7,000 years ago. So a little bit earlier than what we're talking about. You're already seeing signs of a cooling climate, signs of an agricultural crisis, crop returns not being so good, a thinning of the footprint of humans in the landscape in general, and more violence and that violence among the farmers. Right. This is before the Yamnaya arrive reaches quite a devastating peak. I mean, you have settlements in Central Europe that have been excavated relatively recently, where you have a sort of central gathering of dwellings, and then you have defenses which get higher and higher over time. You have signs of human sacrifice, massacres, mass graves. One archaeologist I spoke to, a German archaeologist called Detlef Groenenborn, told me that he had images in his mind of Apocalypse now, you know, people with painted faces and limbs hanging in trees. I mean, it was really. There was a real peak of violence there, at least in parts of Europe. So, yes, the question is, you know, how do these Things fit together in time. Now, there are some of these archaeologists and geneticists who've been working on this prehistoric plague who are fairly convinced that they don't yet have the evidence, but they say they will have very soon, that the plague was the cause of the Neolithic decline. And of course, there's this gray area because we don't think we've got the earliest cases of it, so we don't think we've got the full picture. But there's another school of thought that, no, it was already happening beforehand and the real, the genuine underlying cause was the climate change, the agricultural crisis, and maybe it was just exacerbated by the plague that came in, or maybe the Amnaya brought the plague in. All the very lethal, contagious strains of the plague, which basically just finished off these communities that were already in dire straits and some of them had even abandoned their settlements or just vanished, who

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

had potentially also been suffering from, as of yet, an invisible disease that we don't know about.

[Laura Spinney]

Yes, exactly.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

It's so fascinating, and it sounds like, from you saying from just then, that this is just the beginning, that with more research into the DNA, microbe DNA and more samples taken from across Eurasia, from across Europe.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

That we are now going to start learning more and more about just how important plague was in our prehistoric human story.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah, totally. And even making major new findings about the historical period. So we were talking about the migration period of the barbarian invasions after the fall of the Roman Empire. And fairly recently, the geneticists have found smallpox in Viking populations who were moving about all over Europe at that time, spreading it around. And that's way before we thought it was a major problem. And smallpox is one of the most lethal diseases known to man. It's thought to have killed upwards of 300,000, 300 million people. Sorry, in the 20th century alone. Of course, it was eradicated or declared eradicated in 1980, but it's absolutely lethal. And so knowing when it began would be interesting. There's the famous case of Ramses 5, the young pharaoh, who is thought to have died of it because a mummy again. And there's evidence of the blisters, the smallpox marks, pockmarks on his body, but I don't think his DNA has been tested yet, so that remains to be determined with certainty that he had smallpox and he died more than 3,000 years ago. So this is a story in progress. The dates are changing and again, with smallpox, we don't know what kind of disease it was back then, because what it looks like Is that the form that the Vikings had was very different genetically from the form that we knew in later history. So one idea is that it was actually quite mild back then, quite common and quite mild. So, you know, we always have to take into account that the diseases were not necessarily what we think of them when, you know, when we hear the name.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

They're different today, as I don't blame the fleas for the prehistoric plague.

[Laura Spinney]

Fleas are innocent, you know, because I wrote my book about the Indo European languages, and these two stories have become so entwined. I think we need to get our heads around how disease has shaped history, I mean, in modern times, because we have the tools to control them. Although, of course, we are not immune to pandemics. As we've just seen, the proportion of the population that is lost to a pandemic each time is now relatively small. So, you know, you're not going to wipe out a whole civilization or a culture or a way of life with a pandemic probably anymore. Besides which, we've got historical records to tell us what we were doing and so on. But nevertheless, they remain a powerful force, and in prehistory probably shaped ideas that people had, the languages that they had, the survival of whole populations and cultures. We need to start to think about diseases as a major historical force.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

It could destroy an entire farming community if their way of life was gathering around a fire or sharing secrets in a hut or something like that. It could eradicate an entire community, which to us today feels unrelatable, quite frankly.

[Laura Spinney]

And if you think, say, this hypothetical community had its own religion, had some very advanced technologies, why not? And those were all wiped out with it, and there was no written record because we're talking about pre history, perhaps there have been massive losses that we didn't even know what was there beforehand, and diseases the culprit.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

And we touched on it briefly to think about that psychologically, when. When they see this coming, or you hear about the village over that suffered, like, how would they respond? What kind of offerings would they make? How would they try and appease the plague before modern medicine and the like. And that's another podcast in its own right. But that kind of human element behind how they tried to. How scared they must have been as well, trying to appease what must have been in their eyes, a divine punishment almost.

[Laura Spinney]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Laura, this has been absolutely fantastic, as always. Always fun to go back and do science and prehistory together with you. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

[Laura Spinney]

Great pleasure to be here.

[Tristan Hughes]

Well, there you go. There was Laura Spinney returning to the show to talk through the story of the prehistoric plague.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

What a topic.

[Laura Spinney]

What.

[Tristan Hughes]

What a title. What an interview. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. Now, if you have been enjoying the Ancients recently, then please make sure to

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

follow the show on Spotify or wherever

[Tristan Hughes]

you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favor if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well.

[Interviewer (possibly Tristan Hughes or co-host)]

Well, we'd really appreciate that.

[Tristan Hughes]

Now don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with the new release every week. Sign [e-mail] subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

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