When you’ve been in the beaver biz as long as I have you’ve pretty much seen it all. Beavers blamed for fires, floods bridge collapses, even hospital medical records loss. But this? This I had not expected. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.
Earliest known strain of plague could have come from a beaver bite
Scientists have found the earliest known strain of plague in the remains of a 5000-year-old hunter gatherer.
The “astonishing” discovery pushes back the first appearance of the plague bacterium (Yersina Pestis) by more than 2,000 years, study senior author Ben Krause-Kyora, a biochemist and archaeologist at the University of Kiel in Germany said in a statement. This date is probably close to when the bacteria first evolved, he added.
The plague-carrying hunter-gatherer, dubbed “RV 2039”, was a 20- to 30-year-old man and one of four people whose remains were excavated from a burial site near the Baltic Sea in Latvia. An analysis of samples from the man’s teeth and bones revealed that he was likely the only one among those buried with the disease. Researchers reconstructed the bacteria’s genome using genome sequencing, and believe the bacteria was likely a part of a lineage that emerged roughly 7,000 years ago, not long after Yersina Pestis split from a predecessor, Yersina pseudotuberculosis.
You see before the plague was carried by fleas it was delivered in a more cumbersome way. An animal bite to a human. And what animal should be blamed that always comes in handy?
The beaver of course. Is there any other?
But the switch to fleas as a means of transmission required the disease to kill its host: an old host’s death encourages fleas to move to a new host and pass on the disease. The researchers speculate that this new gene was responsible for driving the plague to become deadlier.
Because this early strain of Y. pestis was not yet flea-borne, the scientists think that the bacteria originally entered the hunter-gatherer’s body through a rodent bite, possibly from a beaver, a common carrier of the plague predecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis and the species with the most remains recorded at the site. Once there, the course of the disease was fairly slow, with bacteria slowly accumulating in high quantities in the man’s bloodstream until he died.
Now now. Don’t argue your CSI complaints to me. There was circumstantial evidence! The beaver remains were in the area. He was bitten by the castor plague! Don’t argue that maybe beaver bones were scattered around because he fricken’ ATE them. Or that the most likely rodent bite came from a RAT who’s tiny little remains blew away,
It was the beavers fault. There can be no other possible explanation. That’s only too obvious.
The three pandemics the bacteria would go on to cause are among the deadliest biological events in human history. The first pandemic, the Justinian Plague (which occurred roughly between A.D. 542 and 750), may have caused the Mediterranean population to decline by 40% by the end of the sixth century. The second, and most infamous, pandemic caused by the disease was the 14th century European Black Death, which killed approximately 25 million people — between 33 to 50% of Europe’s population. A third, lesser known, pandemic began in 1855 in China’s Yunnan province and killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone.
Look what that rotten beaver started. Covid is a frickin walk in the park compared to the beaver plague!
The people buried around RV 2039 were not infected and he was carefully placed in his grave, two indications that he didn’t carry the later, highly-contagious version of the disease. But because of its presence in his blood, scientists still think the plague bacteria could have killed him.
Rotten Beaver.
The idea that this ancient bacteria replicated slowly and was passed from rodent to human is bolstered by the fact that scientists have found other ancient skeletons infected with Y. pestis at other sites, where people lived very different lifestyles. “Isolated cases of transmission from animals to people could explain the different social environments where these ancient diseased humans are discovered. We see it in societies that are herders in the steppe, hunter-gatherers who are fishing, and in farmer communities — totally different social settings but always spontaneous occurrences of Y. pestis cases,” Krause-Kyora said.
You know how beavers always go around BITING people. And how we read stories about it happening all the time. I mean people strolling innocently down to the creek and and beavers leaping out and biting them to spread pandemics.
It’s amazing anyone in Martinez survived at all.
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