World's Oldest Plague Bacteria Found In 5,000-Year-Old Hunter Gatherer - IFLScience World's Oldest Plague Bacteria Found In 5,000-Year-Old Hunter Gatherer - IFLScience Posted: 28 Jun 2021 04:01 PM PDT The oldest known strain of Yersinia pestis — the notorious bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death — has been discovered in the remains of a hunter-gatherer who died over 5,000-years-ago. This new discovery, reported in the journal Cell Reports this week, pushes back the earliest discovery of Y. pestis by well over 1,000 years and suggests the bacteria strain was likely part of a lineage that emerged about 7,000 years ago, over 2,000 years earlier than other studies have previously found. "What's most astonishing is that we can push back the appearance of Y. pestis 2,000 years farther than previously published studies suggested," Ben Krause-Kyora, senior study author and head of the aDN