Plague appears
Yersinia pestis is already infecting people five thousand years ago.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.8 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
DNA recovered from Bronze Age teeth across Eurasia shows Yersinia pestis circulating in humans from at least 3000 BCE — far earlier than the first historically recorded pandemic. These early strains lack the gene that lets the modern bacterium block a flea's gut and be transmitted efficiently by fleas, so they probably spread differently and less explosively. Their appearance coincides with the steppe migrations and with population declines in Neolithic Europe.