/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>49993168
Unironically most likely also black death (bubonic plague)

Its been a problem for a long time. Also population numbers are very rough estimates

>The earliest of these infections comes from a burial in Germany linked to the six-century Plague of Justinian3. Yet some historians suspect that Y. pestis was also responsible for earlier outbreaks such as the Plague of Athens, which struck the city-state in the fifth century bc, at the height of the Peloponnesian War.

>Suspecting that an infection similar to plague might have been involved, the same team analysed 89 billion fragments of raw DNA data from the Bronze Age skeletons in search of Y. pestis sequences. Teeth from 7 of the 101 individuals tested positive, and 2 contained enough plague DNA to generate complete genome sequences. The oldest of the Bronze Age plague strains came from an individual who lived nearly 5,000 years ago in southeast Russia, pushing back the origins of plague by some 3,000 years. The findings are published today in Cell1.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18633