The Black Death is considered one of the most devastating pandemics in the history of humankind. More than 50 million individuals lost their lives due to the pandemic, which swept through Europe in 1347. Now, DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons has linked the emergence of plague to time as early as 3,000 BC. The DNA suggested that the plague first emerged thousands of years than previously thought and did not spread ferociously.

Yersinia pestis is the bacterium responsible for the Black Death and a number of other plagues in human history. The historic analysis of the disease’s spread and symptoms is same as that of modern outbreaks of bubonic plague.

The earliest infection has come from a German burial linked to the six-century Plague of Justinian. But, there are some historians who think that Y. pestis caused earlier outbreaks like the Plague of Athens.

According to some studies, during the Bronze Age, weapon and transport technologies were very famous. At that time, these technologies spread across Eurasia. Earlier in 2015, two ancient-genome studies described an exodus of people from today’s Russia and Ukraine.

Morten Allentoft, a researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen who is a member of a team that analyzed DNA of about 101 Bronze Age skeletons, said, “But we didn’t know what the cause of these quite sudden migrations was”.

The team also examined DNA data from the Bronze Age skeletons to search the of Y. pestissequences. It found that teeth of about 7 individuals were positive.