ArticleCell2015
Early divergent strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 years ago.
Article in Cell, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 194 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
194 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Rapid diagnostic tests for plague.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2020Pooled it
- Ancient DNA and Human Physiology.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2026Review
- A Genetic Risk Variant Associated With the Risk of Primary Biliary Cholangitis Is Inherited From Neanderthals.Liver international : official journal of the International Association for the Study of the Liver · 2026Article
- A minimal hybridization capture approach for the parallel enrichment and cost-effective detection of ancient human pathogens.iScience · 2026Article
- A prehistoric East-Asian Yersinia pestis genome and a ~5.3 ka trans-Eurasian expansion of plague.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Abundance ofPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Article
- Recovery and analysis of ancient DNA: challenges, methods, and applications in forensic and archaeological science.Journal, genetic engineering & biotechnology · 2026Article
- Insights into infectious diseases through ancient pathogen genomics.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Probing the zooarchaeological record across time and space for ancient pathogen DNA.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Temporal shifts in polygenic traits track major epidemics in Western Eurasia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Population discontinuity in the Paris Basin linked to evidence of the Neolithic decline.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- The genomic history of Streptococcus mutans from the Mesolithic until modern times.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Ancient DNA insights into diverse pathogens and their hosts.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- CarpeDeam: a de novo metagenome assembler for heavily damaged ancient datasets.Genome biology · 2025Article
- Plagued by the Past, Pressed by the Present: A One Health Perspective onBiomedicines · 2025Review
- Ancient Origins and Global Diversity of Plague: Genomic Evidence for Deep Eurasian Reservoirs and Recurrent Emergence.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Genetic Evidence ofGenes · 2025Article
- Article
- The outcasts, the sick, and the undead: atypical burials of the late medieval to modern greater Poland.Scientific reports · 2025Article
134 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
31 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The bacteria Yersinia pestis is the etiological agent of plague and has caused human pandemics with millions of deaths in historic times. How and when it originated remains contentious. Here, we report the oldest direct evidence of Yersinia pestis identified by ancient DNA in human teeth from Asia and Europe dating from 2,800 to 5,000 years ago. By sequencing the genomes, we find that these ancient plague strains are basal to all known Yersinia pestis. We find the origins of the Yersinia pestis lineage to be at least two times older than previous estimates. We also identify a temporal sequence of genetic changes that lead to increased virulence and the emergence of the bubonic plague. Our results show that plague infection was endemic in the human populations of Eurasia at least 3,000 years before any historical recordings of pandemics.
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