瘟疫曾袭击前农业社区

It had long been assumed that large disease outbreaks didn’t start until the rise of agriculture, but a burial site in Siberia challenges that, discovers Michael Le Page ANCIENT DNA from hunter-gatherers buried near Lake Baikal in Siberia suggests there were deadly outbreaks of the plague as long as 5500 years ago. The finding runs counter to the idea that major disease outbreaks arose along with the adoption of farming during the so-called Neolithic revolution. “The expectation is that big outbreaks of disease affecting entire communities didn’t exist at all before the Neolithic revolution,” says Ruairidh Macleod at the University of Oxford. …