A set of ancient teeth unlock a bacterial secret about the bubonic plague
Nearly 4,000 years ago, a woman and a man were buried together just east of the Volga River in modern-day Russia, with a secret locked away in the pulp of their teeth.
The bodies were uncovered just a few years ago, the teeth pulled and sent westward to the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where Maria Spyrou was working on a Ph.D. in paleogenetics. When she subjected the pulp to a bevy of genetic tests, she found something surprising: an ancestor of the bacteria responsible for the Black Death.
She published that finding Friday in Nature Communications, providing evidence that the bacteria has origins at least 800 years earlier than scientists had previously thought....