Title : Archaeological and genetic evidence of earliest records of plague endemic (5,100 – 5,600 Years BP) and its especial relevance to zoonotic pathogen ecology, human resilience, public awareness, and health policy
Abstract:
Deadly infectious diseases such as the medieval Black Death (plague) and 20th-century Ebola have caused catastrophic loss of human life and generated great fear in the past and in contemporary human populations. Infectious disease epidemics persist as a threat and certainly will continue to do so in the future. A complete understanding of the history of human infectious diseases is beneficial as it can aid in disease prediction, prevention, and control in living populations. Therefore, there is a critical need to characterize their existence and behavior, and geographic and temporal variation thereof, based on evidence from past outbreaks. However, in the absence of relevant historic records, deadly infectious diseases, which caused rapid mortality and thus did not leave diagnostic bony lesions, are undetectable in skeletal assemblages using conventional macroscopic paleopathological approaches. This leaves us with a significant knowledge gap about infectious disease in the prehistoric era. A recently discovered Neolithic Hamin settlement dated to 5,100-5,600 years ago was abandoned as a result of the rapid death of a mass number of village dwellers. While circumstantial human skeletal morphology and mortality patterns and archaeological evidence suggest the manner of death not a result of interpersonal conflict but more likely a deadly infectious disease, new genetic evidence confirms the presence of Yersinia pestis, a bacterium of zoonotic origin that is responsible for plague. By integrating pathogen screening within the context of environmental and sociocultural shifts, our NSF-funded multidisciplinary study provides an unprecedented look at human history and beginnings of civilizations as a story of interspecies entanglements and human resilience across millennia. Moreover, it has an important impact on public awareness and policy making regarding deadly infectious diseases for contemporary populations with different economic-social status, ranging from pre-agriculture to modernization. By revealing what happened leading to the demise of the Hamin Settlement in its ecological and microbiological contexts, findings of this study will not only inform future epidemics with firsthand health status and diseases patterns of an evolutionary sense, but also expand existing databases for global and local health agency authorities to motivate action in the face of crises today, such as policy-making encouraging disease research, and efforts to reduce socioeconomic disparities that affect vulnerability and mortality during crises.
This project is supported by NSF grant BCS#2040388 to Q. Wang and S. DeWitte.
