The discovery of plague DNA in a 4,000-year-old sheep bone is rewriting the story of one of humanity’s most feared pathogens, revealing that the disease’s early spread depended on animals long before ...

Archaeologists working in the Southern Ural Mountains have uncovered an unexpected clue about how an ancient plague once moved across Eurasia. A tiny sheep tooth found at the Bronze Age site of Arkaim ...

Long before the Black Death killed millions across Europe in the Middle Ages, an earlier, more elusive version of the plague spread across much of Eurasia. For years, scientists were unsure how the ...

In the Middle Ages, a plague killed a third of Europe's population. Fleas carried the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, transmitting the Black Death from infected rats to millions of people. Another, ...