Posted
Bubonic plague and ancient DNA are having a media moment. Evo in the News most recently covered a search for DNA from the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, in graves from the 1300s. Last month, we celebrated Svante Pääbo’s Nobel prize for his work on ancient DNA. And this month, we dig into another investigation that excavated DNA from the time of the Black Death, a particularly deadly plague outbreak, to illuminate how that epidemic shaped the course of human evolution.