Ancient disease which wiped out 50million people discovered in DNA of Egyptian mummy Samples of the Black Death, which wiped out as many as 50 million people in medieval Europe, have been found in an ancient Egyptian mummy.
In a report by the European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association, the team said: “Here, we report the presence of Y. pestis DNA in an ancient Egyptian mummy of an adult male from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy.
Recently, a team of archaeologists took samples from an ancient Egyptian mummy housed at the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy.
Thereby, we detected Y. pestis DNA in both samples indicating broad tissue tropism of the pathogen during an already advanced state of disease progression.
Symptoms of the killer disease included horrific skin sores, swollen lymph nodes and a sudden high fever and it got its grisly nickname as victims’ tongues would turn black.
