Above, coffins that also date back to the New Kingdom era unearthed in Tuna el Gebel district of Minya, Egypt last year] While teams of archeologists and geneticists previously located traces of Y. pestis in the remains of 5,000-year-old human skeletons unearthed in what is now Russia, the new find marks the first discovery of the disease outside Eurasia.
Ancient disease discovered in ancient DNA of Egyptian mummy One of the oldest known cases of the 'Black Death' plague has been uncovered in the ancient DNA of a 3,290-year-old Egyptian mummy.
The infected mummy gives new clues as to how the deadly plagued first spread west and provides 'molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt.'.
While the DNA samples the team in Italy took of the plague-infected mummy showed 'an already advanced state of disease progression,' the evidence is only the beginning of an exploration into whether ancient Egypt faced its own 'Black Death.
The cvirus Yersinia pestis, or the bubonic plague, is known for the havoc it wrought in medieval Europe — where the fatal disease wiped out nearly 50million people from 1346 to 1353 in a historic deadly pandemic.
