A team of archaeologists and paleopathologists from Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, analyzed a male Egyptian mummy and they found something unexpected from more than 3,700 years ago. After performing radiocarbon tests that indicated that he lived between the end of the Second Intermediate Period and the beginning of the New Kingdom of Egypt, they extracted samples of bone tissue and intestinal contents from the mummy, and found traces of Yersinia pestis DNA. An agent that causes the Black Death or Bubonic Plague and was responsible for the largest pandemic in history.
This finding could rewrite what we know about the history of this disease because it is the first scientific evidence of the presence of the Black Death in Africa. This disease is best known because in the Middle Ages it unleashed a devastating epidemic that killed more than 50 million people. At the same time, this study raises questions about how this disease may have affected ancient societies outside of Europe and Asia.
The first scientific evidence of the presence of the Black Death in Africa
He report presented during the European Meeting of the Association of Paleopathology, states that “this is the first prehistoric genome of Y. pestis found outside of Eurasia that provides molecular evidence for the presence of plague in Ancient Egypt.” Is proof that the pathogen reached a greater geographical presence at an earlier time than has been tested so far.
The scientists used the target-target metagenomics method, a technique that allows ancient pathogens to be identified by analyzing DNA fragments extracted from human remains. And they found that The mummy suffered severe symptoms of the plague before his death.
Eurac Research researchers
Another implication of this analysis carried out by the Italian research center Eurac Research is thathelps support theories of possible outbreaks of bubonic plague on the banks of the Nile in the Ancient Age. Until now, previous studies only established hypotheses about the existence of outbreaks of the plague spread by rats that moved on the banks of the Nile, which then passed to the black rats that were present on commercial ships. And it was transmitted through fleas that lived on these animals that inoculated the bacillus to humans with their bite.
The first archaeological evidence that revealed the presence of this infection were found in skeletons from 5,000 years ago, in Crimea. And in Africa, archaeologists had found documentary evidence of her presence in a letter from the Babylonian king Burnaburiash that tells that an Asian wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III had died “during the plague.” And Tutankhamun’s restoration edict speaks of “When His Majesty appeared as king… the country was going through illness.” The high proportion of deaths in the Amarna cemetery suggested to researchers the action of an epidemic.
In the current study, the scientists point out that “the genomic data obtained need to be analyzed further to determine the variety of this ancient strain and characterize “its possible modes of transmission and pathology.”
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