En déferlant sur l’Europe au Moyen Âge, la Peste noire fut à l’origine de la pandémie la plus meurtrière de l’histoire de l’humanité, éradiquant près d’un tiers de sa population. Transmise à l’homme par les piqûres de puces porteuses de la bactérie Yersinia pestis et véhiculées notamment par les rats, cette maladie aurait trouvé son origine dans la région du massif de Tian Shan, aux confins du Kirghizstan, de la Chine et du Kazakhstan.
Toutefois une étude référencée ci-dessous publiée dans la revue Nature suggère que cette bactérie, apparue il y a plusieurs milliers d’années, pourrait avoir, bien avant cela, provoqué une autre épidémie et précipité le « déclin du Néolithique » face aux tribus guerrières venues d’Asie.
Source
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07651-2
Repeated plague infections across six generations of Neolithic Farmers
- Frederik Seershol and others Nature (2024)
- Abstract
- In the period between 5,300 and 4,900 calibrated years before present (cal. BP), populations across large parts of Europe underwent a period of demographic decline1,2. However, the cause of this so-called Neolithic decline is still debated. Some argue for an agricultural crisis resulting in the decline3, others for the spread of an early form of plague4. Here we use population-scale ancient genomics to infer ancestry, social structure and pathogen infection in 108 Scandinavian Neolithic individuals from eight megalithic graves and a stone cist. We find that the Neolithic plague was widespread, detected in at least 17% of the sampled population and across large geographical distances. We demonstrate that the disease spread within the Neolithic community in three distinct infection events within a period of around 120 years. Variant graph-based pan-genomics shows that the Neolithic plague genomes retained ancestral genomic variation present in Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, including virulence factors associated with disease outcomes. In addition, we reconstruct four multigeneration pedigrees, the largest of which consists of 38 individuals spanning six generations, showing a patrilineal social organization. Lastly, we document direct genomic evidence for Neolithic female exogamy in a woman buried in a different megalithic tomb than her brothers. Taken together, our findings provide a detailed reconstruction of plague spread within a large patrilineal kinship group and identify multiple plague infections in a population dated to the beginning of the Neolithic decline.
Europe Solidaire 