Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago
Ruairidh Macleod, Frederik V. Seersholm, Bianca De Sanctis, Angela Lieverse, Adrian Timpson, Rick Schulting, Jesper T. Stenderup, Charleen Gaunitz, Lasse Vinner, Olga Ivanovna Goriunova, Vladimir Ivanovich Bazaliiskii, Sergei V. Vasilyev, Erin Jessup, Yucheng Wang, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Mark G. Thomas, Russell Corbett-Detig, Astrid K. N. Iversen, Andrzej W. Weber, Martin Sikora, Eske Willerslev · 2026
Read Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago by Ruairidh Macleod, Frederik V. Seersholm, Bianca De Sanctis, Angela Lieverse, Adrian Timpson, Rick Schulting, Jesper T. Stenderup, Charleen Gaunitz, Lasse Vinner, Olga Ivanovna Goriunova, Vladimir Ivanovich Bazaliiskii, Sergei V. Vasilyev, Erin Jessup, Yucheng Wang, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Mark G. Thomas, Russell Corbett-Detig, Astrid K. N. Iversen, Andrzej W. Weber, Martin Sikora, Eske Willerslev (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13275307.txt.
Description
Ruairidh Macleod and a large team present a 2026 journal article reporting lethal plague outbreaks among Siberian hunter-gatherers about fifty-five hundred years ago. Early plague strains lacked the genes for flea-borne bubonic spread, so whether they could kill en masse was disputed. The team recovered ancient bacterial genomes from burials near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia.
Across four cemeteries, thirty-nine percent of tested individuals carried plague infection, in two outbreak phases. Family pedigrees showed small kin groups hit within a single generation, pointing to person-to-person spread, and children aged eight to eleven died acutely in high numbers. The strains split off before all known plague lineages, pushing the bacterium's emergence back beyond roughly fifty-seven hundred years ago.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ruairidh Macleod, Frederik V. Seersholm, Bianca De Sanctis, Angela Lieverse, Adrian Timpson, Rick Schulting, Jesper T. Stenderup, Charleen Gaunitz, Lasse Vinner, Olga Ivanovna Goriunova, Vladimir Ivanovich Bazaliiskii, Sergei V. Vasilyev, Erin Jessup, Yucheng Wang, Christopher Bronk Ramsey, Mark G. Thomas, Russell Corbett-Detig, Astrid K. N. Iversen, Andrzej W. Weber, Martin Sikora, Eske Willerslev |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 59538 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |