Plague Began Infecting Humans Much Earlier Than Thought

The germ that causes the plague began infecting humans thousands of years earlier than scientists had previously thought. The earliest sample that had plague DNA was from Bronze Age Siberia, and dated back to 2794 B.C., and the latest specimen with plague, from early Iron Age Armenia, dated back to 951 B.C. "We were able to find genuine Yersinia pestisDNA in our samples 3,000 years earlier than what had previously been shown," said Simon Rasmussen, a lead author of the study and a bioinformatici