Russian scientists have analyzed the DNA of four representatives of the Fatyanovo culture, which existed in the central part of our country during the Bronze Age. The remains belonged to four adult men with a typical Central European origin for representatives of this cultural community. At the same time, the researchers discovered that these people are also united by the pathogenic bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, which can cause pneumonia and meningitis. The article was published in the journal Stratum plus.
Until recently, scientists could learn about ancient people's diseases mainly only in cases where they left noticeable traces on bones. But modern methods sometimes allow us to identify even those infections that do not affect bones at all, progressing too quickly. In particular, this concerns the plague, which, as it turned out in recent years, people encountered more than five thousand years ago. Sometimes ancient remains contain DNA of other pathogens, such as the hepatitis B virus or the leprosy pathogen.
This time, Asya Engovatova from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with colleagues from several Russian scientific organizations, focused on DNA analysis of the remains of four adults whose burials were excavated in the Volosovo-Danilovsky burial ground, located in the Yaroslavl region. This monument is a very large burial complex from the middle of the 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC, associated with the Fatyanovo archaeological culture of the Bronze Age.
All of the remains examined belonged to adult males who lived between 20 and 40 years. For three of them, the scientists obtained radiocarbon dates, which indicated that the oldest individual lived around 2500 BC, and the latest, around 2000 BC. The men were apparently not closely related, but they appeared to be carriers of one Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1a1 and four different mitochondrial haplogroups: U5a1d2a, H2a2a1e, T1a1, and I1a. In their origin, these people were close to the bearers of the Bell Beaker culture, as well as to a representative of the Preunetice culture and some bearers of the Sintashta culture.
The scientists then analyzed the DNA of bacteria and viruses that were preserved in the remains of the four men. It turned out that all the samples contained genetic material from the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae, which can cause a number of serious diseases, including pneumonia and meningitis. An earlier case of this bacterium being detected in ancient finds comes from Denmark, where scientists found chewed birch tar that was about 5,700 years old. It contained not only the DNA of a dark-skinned and blue-eyed woman, but also the genetic material of microbes, including streptococci and the Epstein-Barr virus.
Recently, researchers discovered the DNA of the plague bacillus in the remains of an ancient sheep, which was found during excavations of the famous Arkaim monument of the Sintashta archaeological culture. The genetic material of the bacteria was preserved in a bone that is almost four thousand years old.
