Rare face tattoos on 800-year-old mystery mummy baffle archaeologists
An 800-year-old mummy donated to a museum in Italy a century ago has revealed new clues about ancient face tattoos. But the mummy's origin remains shrouded in mystery.
Some time prior to 1930, the mummy of an adult female was donated to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAET) at the University of Turin, with no records of its archaeological context. The mummy recently caught the attention of a team of researchers due to the surprising presence of tattoos on her face.
In a study published in the May-June issue of the Journal of Cultural Heritage, the international team of researchers detailed their analysis of the mummy and her tattoos, noting that they were extremely unusual both in their location and in the composition of the ink used to make them.
The mummy has straight black hair cropped short and is tightly flexed into a seated position, typical of mummy burials in the Andes. Researchers carbon-dated textile fragments stuck to the body and determined the woman died between A.D. 1215 and 1382.
"On the basis of current evidence — particularly preservation, body placement, associated materials and documents — a South American origin is strongly supported," study lead author Gianluigi Mangiapane, an anthropologist at the University of Turin, told Live Science in an email.
Related: Lasers reveal hidden patterns in tattoos of 1,200-year-old Peru mummies
But while looking closely at the mummy using infrared reflectography, a technique often used to "see through" paint layers of artwork to find older brush strokes, the research team noted a series of unusual tattoos: three lines on the mummy's right cheek, one line on the left cheek and an S-shape on the right wrist.
"Skin marks on the face are rare among the groups of the ancient Andean region and even rarer on the cheeks," the researchers wrote in the study, and the S-shaped tattoo "is so far unique for the Andean region."
To identify the ink used to make the tattoos, the researchers used a suite of non-destructive techniques. Although they expected to find evidence of charcoal in the ink, they instead discovered that the unusual ink was made with magnetite, an iron oxide mineral, with traces of the mineral augite. In South America, augite and magnetite can be found together in southern Peru, suggesting a potential homeland for the mummified woman.
"There are a small number of ethnographic accounts from the Americas that describe the use of mineral or earth pigments such as hematite or magnetite for tattooing, and the new study fits quite nicely with those," Aaron Deter-Wolf, an archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology who was not involved in the study, told Live Science by email.
But Deter-Wolf, who is an expert in ancient tattooing, is not convinced that the mystery mummy hails from the Andes.
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"Stylistically, these particular face markings have far more in common with historic Arctic or Amazonian traditions than with Andean practices," Deter-Wolf said. "It would be fascinating to see what oxygen isotopes or other studies might be able to tell us about the origins of this individual."
At this stage, though, isotope analyses have not been carried out. "Since these types of analyses are invasive, we have currently decided to limit such procedures in order to preserve the integrity of the remains," Mangiapane said.
But the MAET that houses the mummy is interested in further investigation, Mangiapane said, and this may include future cultural comparisons to better understand the nature of the mysterious mummy's facial tattoos.
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Fox News
2 days ago
- Fox News
Cigarette butts make roads stronger than ever before
Cigarette butts are the most littered item on the planet. People toss out an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts each year, and that number may double by the end of 2025 as e-cigarette use grows. These small, toxic waste items pollute city streets, beaches and waterways. They also take years to break down. But that may be starting to change. Scientists have developed a way to recycle cigarette butts into asphalt, creating roads that are both stronger and more sustainable. Research teams from the University of Granada in Spain and the University of Bologna in Italy have studied the process closely, highlighting its potential to improve road performance while cutting down on waste. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide — free when you join my Modern road construction often relies on additives to improve the strength and flexibility of asphalt. Some road-building materials already use cellulose fibers like those found in cigarette filters. That sparked the idea to take used butts, clean them up and put them to work. E-cigarette filters are especially promising. They are longer and packed with fibers like cellulose and polylactic acid (PLA) fibers, making them ideal for reinforcing asphalt. The recycling process involves several steps: 1. Collecting and sorting: Filters from traditional and e-cigarettes go through a collection and cleaning process. Ash and residue are removed, leaving behind usable fiber material. 2. Shredding and mixing: Machines shred the cleaned fibers and combine them with synthetic hydrocarbon wax, which serves as a binder. 3. Pellet formation: The blended material is pressed, heated and cut into small pellets that can be easily stored and transported. 4. Asphalt integration: These pellets are added to reclaimed asphalt and bitumen. During heating, the pellets melt and release reinforcing fibers that strengthen the final asphalt mix. Up to 40% of the final road material can come from these recycled components. Recycled cigarette butts make asphalt stronger, more flexible and longer-lasting. The fibers released during mixing act as micro reinforcement, improving fatigue resistance and helping roads withstand heavy traffic and temperature changes. The wax in the pellets lowers the temperature needed to mix asphalt, reducing both energy use and emissions during production. Beyond performance, this method gives cigarette waste a second life. By repurposing billions of discarded filters, cities can reduce litter and pollution while building more sustainable infrastructure. This technique is still emerging, but interest is growing worldwide. In Bratislava, Slovakia, city officials have already started collecting cigarette butts specifically for road construction. One road built with this recycled asphalt is already in use, setting an example for other cities to follow. As more pilot projects roll out and awareness spreads, cigarette butts could shift from toxic litter to a valuable resource in sustainable infrastructure. Recycling cigarette butts into asphalt solves two problems at once. It clears toxic waste from public spaces and makes roads that last longer. This approach turns one of the world's most common pollutants into a valuable construction material. As more cities explore cleaner, smarter infrastructure, this kind of solution could play a big role in the future of street design. Would you support roads built with recycled cigarette butts in your city? Let us know by writing to us at Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide — free when you join my Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
CNN
2 days ago
- CNN
I tried to find out if the fossil I bought online was real. Then I realized I was asking the wrong question
Animal stories Ancient creatures Africa Retail consumerFacebookTweetLink Follow It stands to reason that a 95 million-year-old tooth shipped to my home would have a rich past. But what ensued after I bought it online for about $100 revealed how, for such relics and those who covet them, the present is in some ways much more complicated. I always wanted to own a fossil, and once the algorithm picked up on that desire, ads flooded my Instagram feed. It then became impossible to resist the thrill of purchasing a piece of one of the largest predators that ever existed: Spinosaurus, a semiaquatic meat-eater that could reach almost 60 feet (about 18 meters) in length — longer and heavier than Tyrannosaurus rex. When the package arrived, in a pretty glass dome and with a preprinted certificate of authenticity that stated it came from North Africa, the long pointy tooth looked the part to my untrained eyes: yellowish brown, with varying textures and a stonelike appearance. But some obvious cracks that suggested the specimen had perhaps been patched together from multiple fragments left me wondering: Was it real? To find out, I took it to London's Natural History Museum, where Susannah Maidment, a senior researcher and fossil expert, examined it. 'Yeah, it's a fossil, for sure,' she said. 'It's got a rounded cross section with ridges down the front and back, so it's probably a Spinosaurus tooth.' To my relief, I hadn't been duped. But it turns out my fossil wasn't as rare as I thought. 'This is almost certainly from Morocco, because almost all Spinosaurus fossils that we know of are from the Kem Kem formation of Morocco, and they're intensively excavated there,' Maidment added, referring to a fossil bed in southeastern Morocco that has yielded an abundance of predatory dinosaur specimens. 'The thing about teeth is that dinosaurs and other reptiles shed them continuously, so one dinosaur will have many, many teeth over its lifetime. And so they're very common.' As a result, according to Maidment, I probably paid too much for it. However, her next observation quickly replaced that concern with another: 'This … has almost certainly been illegally exported and illegally excavated,' she said. 'This specimen — you have it illegally.' Last year, a Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed 'Apex,' measuring nearly 27 feet long (about 8 meters), sold for $44.6 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York City, becoming the most valuable fossil ever sold at auction. Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin reportedly scooped up the specimen, which was discovered in 2022 on private land in Colorado, and it is currently on loan at New York's American Museum of Natural History. The sale was just one in a series of recent high-profile auctions that sent near-complete dinosaur skeletons into private ownership. But the trend can be traced back to the sale of Sue, one of the most complete and largest T. rex fossils ever found. It was unearthed in 1990 and sold at auction in 1997 for $8.36 million after a long legal battle over its ownership. Even though Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History purchased Sue and still has it on display, the pooling together of private funds led to its acquisition and kick-started the era of big-ticket fossil auctions. Seventy-one T. rex specimens are now in private hands, versus 61 held by public trusts, according to a recent study. Peter Lovisek, a fossil broker and curator at Fossil Realm, a gallery in Ottawa, said a key turning point for the market — 'where these pieces began to be seen as cultural icons, artworks, investment assets' — was the auction of a 40-foot-long T. rex named 'Stan,' which sold for $31.8 million in 2020. The media frenzy surrounding Stan, which is part of a planned exhibition at the upcoming Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, brought fossils into the mainstream, Lovisek added. 'Since then, Instagram has become a hub for the fossil industry,' he said. 'A major part of our strategy is to focus on Instagram storytelling, and Instagram is connecting curators, dealers, diggers.' CNN reached out to Instagram for comment but has not received a response. You are now spoiled for choice if you want to buy fossils online. Most online shops offer a range of price points starting at a few dollars and going up into the low thousands, whereas Lovisek said he takes a more upmarket approach, from a few thousand dollars to the six-figure range. And things are just getting started, according to Salomon Aaron, director of David Aaron, a London gallery dealing in ancient art and fossils. 'I think the dinosaur trade is actually still incredibly undervalued,' Aaron said. 'Relative to the art market, we are very much at the beginning, at the start of the dinosaur fossil trade.' On the other hand, it's been over 200 years since the first dinosaur fossil was given a name, Megalosaurus, in 1824. Specimens have now been found on every continent, and more than 50 countries have contributed named species to science, with the United States, China, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mongolia, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom topping the rankings. One enduring misconception, perhaps fueled by the multimillion-dollar auctions, is that fossils are rare. 'Across the world, people assume that everything's going to be unmanageably expensive, but that's not the case,' said Matt Dale, who owns Mr Wood's Fossils, a fossil shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, which also sells online. His cheapest dinosaur fossils are priced under 10 pounds (about $13.50), and include bone fragments, teeth and eggshells. 'I get a lot of questions that I hear again and again. One, where do you get all this stuff? Two, is it real? And three, why is it so cheap?' Dale said. 'The bulk of the stuff in my shop comes from unusually rich sites, where there's an awful lot of material, which makes it much more practical and feasible to collect it and sell it on a commercial basis. There's an artificial impression of how rare fossils are, and that's just — that's not the case for some things.' Most fossil shops in the world will have some of these affordable items, Dale said, including ammonites, or shelled mollusks, from Madagascar; fish from Wyoming's Green River Formation; shark teeth from South Carolina and Florida; and trilobites from the Erfoud area in Morocco's northern Kem Kem region — the same place from where my Spinosaurus tooth likely comes. After telling me that she thought my fossil was illegal, Maidment explained that 'the Moroccan fossil law states that you must have a permit for excavation and that you must have a permit for export, and you can only get a permit for export if you have an excavation license. Unless your seller is able to show you both, they have certainly excavated it illegally and exported it illegally.' The online shop I bought the Spinosaurus tooth from is based in the UK and has a page on its website that asserts its commitment to ethical sourcing of artifacts. The company didn't respond to requests for an interview or comment on the origin of my fossil. Other online retailers offering similar merchandise that I contacted also didn't respond to my interview requests. However, the shop could have legally purchased the fossils from a third party, or at one of many fossil trade shows such as Arizona's Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase. Held annually in January and February, the Arizona event bills itself as the largest gem and mineral show in the world. CNN reached out to the Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase for comment but has not received a response. Morocco is not the only country imposing restrictions on fossil exports with the goal of preserving its cultural heritage. Export bans are also in place in Argentina, Brazil, China and Mongolia. 'All around the world, different countries have different laws. In the UK and the US, if you find something on your land, you can do whatever you want with it,' while in some parts of South America, for example, the person who discovers an artifact has a weaker claim, Maidment said. Brazilian fossils in particular, according to a law established in 1942, don't belong to the finder, noted Taissa Rodrigues, a professor of paleontology at the Federal University of Espirito Santo in Brazil. 'It belongs to the country,' Rodrigues said. 'That means, if you find a fossil, you're not its owner, so that's why you're not allowed to sell it, because it's not up for you to decide.' But Morocco seems to fall into a sort of legal gray area when it comes to fossil exports, said Maidment and David Martill, emeritus professor from the UK's University of Portsmouth. Despite laws in place intended to regulate export of these artifacts, almost all fossils excavated in Morocco end up on the commercial market, according to Martill. A small portion fuel the local souvenir market, and the rest go to fossil dealers who sell them to shops and online retailers throughout the world, he said. 'I am very familiar with the fossil black market in Morocco, because I work there, and we have huge problems at our (excavation) sites, where commercial fossil dealers who are black market smugglers come and excavate illegally from our sites, probably from the specimens that we're digging up,' Maidment said, speaking of those who operated without a proper permit. 'Sometimes we find the fossils, and then they take them, and then they sell them on European websites for up to 30,000 euros. So it's a huge, huge problem.' Morocco's Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, which regulates 'the fields of geology, minerals, hydrocarbons and energies,' has not responded to CNN's requests for comment. The full extent of the questionable movement of fossils across borders is hard to pin down, but it has included important specimens such as Ubirajara jubatus, a feathered dinosaur species first described in a now-retracted 2020 paper from a one-of-a-kind skeleton that had allegedly been illegally exported to Germany from Brazil. Germany's State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe returned the rare remains to Brazil in 2023 among a wave of similar high-profile repatriations, including a 56 million-year-old crocodile fossil that Morocco recovered from the United States. A few years earlier, in 2015, actor Nicolas Cage returned a T. rex skull he bought for $276,000 at auction in 2007 to the Mongolian government. It's more difficult for smaller, less expensive fossils that have been illegally exported to make it back to their country of origin, although in 2022 French customs returned nearly 1,000 fossils from the Araripe Basin in Brazil that had been stolen to be sold online. Neither Martill nor John Nudds, an honorary lecturer in the department of Earth and environmental sciences at the UK's University of Manchester, would go as far as calling my fossil illegal. 'There's a bit of a gray area,' Martill said. 'I can't technically go there and dig fossils without the permission of the ministry in Rabat.' But he added that locals 'can dig fossils, they can cut fossils, they can polish fossils, and tourists can buy the fossils. And if you go to any fossil fair, you'll find Moroccan fossils for sale, and that will include Spinosaurus teeth.' Nudds said he knows of at least one reputable wholesaler based outside Morocco that sells 'an awful lot' of Spinosaurus teeth exactly like mine. 'That's why I'm pretty confident that these are OK to come out of Morocco,' he said. Part of the reason why fossils may occupy a legal gray area, Nudds added, is some ambiguous wording in UNESCO's 1970 Convention, which was designed to prevent the illegal export of items of cultural importance across many categories. The category that includes fossils is described as 'Rare collections and specimens of fauna, flora, minerals and anatomy, and objects of palaeontological interest.' According to Nudds, the wording makes it unclear whether the objects of paleontological interest are in their own category, which would include all fossils, or if they are part of the 'rare collections,' which would not. But when it comes to my tooth, he said he believes that unless the shop I bought it from has smuggled the item out of Morocco, then it is selling it legally, even if it bought it from a smuggler. 'There may be an ethical issue,' Nudds said, 'and there may be a moral or even a scientific issue, but not a legal issue.' Elmahdi Lassale, CEO of M2 Rocks & Minerals, a Moroccan wholesaler and exporter of minerals and fossils that sells directly to retailers in the US, UK and Europe, confirmed that under Moroccan law, since 2020, fossils are classified as geological heritage. Excavating and exporting them isn't strictly off-limits, according to Lassale, but to do so commercially, a license must be obtained from the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development as well as a validated customs certificate. In practice, it means that before each export, Lassale sends the ministry a list of the individual items he wants to sell. 'Normally we just send the descriptions and the names of the items,' he added, 'but sometimes they ask to send a real specimen, to see it in person.' When I asked if he deals in Spinosaurus teeth, he said he doesn't, because it's unlikely that the ministry would approve their export. 'If we talk about dinosaur bones or teeth, it's (almost) impossible to export from Morocco (even) with a license,' Lassale said. Among the items he gets permission to export are trilobites, ammonites, shark teeth, and Mosasaur and Plesiosaur teeth and vertebrae. However, he said he is aware that other fossils do get out of the country via 'illegal suppliers' as well as 'through informal shipments via tourist luggage and small couriers, creating a mixed online market of documented and undocumented specimens abroad.' He estimated the total trade of fossils in Morocco to be worth $30 million to $40 million annually, including official and unofficial exports, and that about 80% of fossils are exported. In a large trade show such as the one in Tucson, he said, there will be on average around 200 Moroccan fossil dealers. Martill and Nudds viewed my fossil during separate video calls. 'You've got a genuine fossil, but I think it's a repair,' Martill said. 'There's a possibility that the tip belongs to a different specimen. You can see some glue — they often find broken examples, and they will just do sympathetic repairs.' However, the human cost of obtaining even an imperfect specimen can be serious, he said. 'Let me tell you now that the man who dug that out of the ground risked not only his life but his lungs as well,' Martill said, adding that he has gone into fossil mines in Morocco and spent time with miners. The fossil trade in Morocco is the main source of income for more than 50,000 people, including diggers, miners, artisans, middlemen and wholesalers who go on to export the fossils, according to a 2018 study. Martill said he believed my tooth came from Hassi el Begaa, a village in the Kem Kem region. 'This is a place where the mines go in from the side of the hill,' Martill said. 'They go in horizontally, for maybe 50 to 100 meters (164 to 328 feet). They then turn to the left or the right, and that's when you lose any hint of sunlight. You're well underground, and the place is incredibly dusty. The miners are often working without masks. They have little head torches, and they dig with tiny crowbars fashioned out of the steel that you use to reinforce concrete. They're not sophisticated tools. 'They do this all day long and then shovel out all of the sand in a wheelbarrow, tip it down the side of the hill and look for the fossils. They're working extremely hard — they're hand-digging a mine,' Martill added. Taking all that into account, he said, what I paid for my tooth fossil 'is probably pretty cheap.' Lassale agreed the fossil diggers in Morocco often work in challenging conditions, including temperatures as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), and with minimal protective equipment, while earning about 120 to 180 Moroccan dirhams (about $13 to $20) daily. He added that his company only partners with artisans and cooperatives that provide safety measures such as shade tents, water and protective goggles to workers, though he said such practices are not common industrywide. 'It's very easy to make a lot of money with this, but it's not easy to dig out minerals or fossils — small artisans, they put their health at risk' to support their families, Lassale said. He noted that mines and shafts dug to reach fossil deposits have been known to collapse sometimes, causing fatalities. 'Unfortunately, we hear about that every year — not just fossil but also mineral mines,' he said. Would I be in trouble if my fossil tooth turned out to be illegal? Experts told me I likely wouldn't, even if the specimen had been illegally exported — the responsibility would likely be on the wholesaler. But things could be different for fossils from countries that have strong restrictions on fossil exports. That's why experts recommend prospective buyers avoid anything advertised from countries such as Brazil, Argentina, China or Mongolia. 'I guess the best advice would be to only buy something if you can see it and hold it in your hand,' Nudds said. 'If you're going to buy online, then maybe avoid those countries which do ban exports, because that's where you're more likely to find forgeries.' Fakes don't seem to be widespread, but they're more common on the cheaper end of the market, according to Lovisek of the Fossil Realms gallery in Canada. 'There's so much scrutiny with the higher end, that the real problem is not forgery, but misrepresentation — claiming there's less restoration than there is, or claiming it's more real bone than there is,' he said. Other than such deceptions or distortions, when it comes to how to purchase a fossil properly, experts offered guidance that would apply to buying pretty much anything online: Do your research, look for a reputable seller, and ask for paperwork or proof that the item is sold legally and ethically. Perhaps the more important question is should you buy a fossil at all? I still look at the Spinosaurus tooth on my bookshelf and marvel that it's the oldest thing in my house by at least 94 million years. But given the complexities around fossils' cultural status and scientific relevance, the dangerous working conditions in some excavation areas, and the fact that many countries are now recovering fossils exported illegally, it's no surprise that the answer to that question has stirred disagreement, even within my small cohort of paleontologists. 'Do not buy your fossils online,' said Maidment of London's Natural History Museum. 'Unless you can absolutely verify that they are being sold legally, and that they're in your country legally, it's best to just not to do it at all. My view of fossils — it's something that belongs to all of us. It's part of our heritage. It shouldn't be something that one person owns.' Martill has a different view, particularly for smaller, less rare specimens that don't hold as much value for researchers. 'There are billions of fossils in the ground. There's no point in them staying in the ground. And scientists like me, there's only so much that you can do with one isolated dinosaur tooth. It's a common fossil; it's scientifically uninteresting,' he said. 'I think it's great that you can have a fossil. You got something there which is 90 to 100 million years old,' Martill added. 'There is a possibility that you could buy a tooth and actually own a piece of the fantastic history of the life on Earth.' Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
A plague mysteriously spread from Europe into Asia 4,000 years ago. Scientists now think they may know how
For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze Age, however, the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, had not yet developed the genetic tool kit that would allow later strains to be spread by fleas. Scientists have been baffled as to how the illness could have persisted at that time. Now, an international team of researchers has recovered the first ancient Yersinia pestis genome from a nonhuman host — a Bronze Age domesticated sheep that lived around 4,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Russia. The discovery has allowed the scientists to better understand the transmission and ecology of the disease in the ancient past, leading them to believe that livestock played a role in its spread throughout Eurasia. The findings were published Monday in the journal Cell. 'Yersinia pestis is a zoonotic disease (transmitted between humans and animals) that emerged during prehistory, but so far the way that we have studied it using ancient DNA has been completely from human remains, which left us with a lot of questions and few answers about how humans were getting infected,' said lead author Ian Light-Maka, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. There have been nearly 200 Y. pestis genomes recovered from ancient humans, the researchers wrote. Finding the ancient bacterium in an animal not only helps researchers understand how the bacterial lineage evolved, but it could also have implications for understanding modern diseases, Light-Maka added via email. 'Evolution can sometimes be 'lazy,' finding the same type of solution independently for a similar problem — the genetic tools that worked for pestis to thrive for over 2000 years across over Eurasia might be reused again.' Unraveling the mystery of a Bronze Age plague The ancient bacterium that caused the Eurasia plague, known today as the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage, spread from Europe all the way to Mongolia, with evidence of the disease found across 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). Recent evidence suggests that the majority of modern human diseases emerged within the last 10,000 years and coincided with the domestication of animals such as livestock and pets, according to a release from the German research institute. Scientists suspected that animals other than rodents were a part of the enormous puzzle of the Bronze Age plague transmission, but without any bacterial genomes recovered from animal hosts, it was not clear which ones. To find the ancient plague genome, the study authors investigated Bronze Age animal remains from an archaeological site in Russia known as Arkaim. The settlement was once associated with a culture called Sintashta-Petrovka, known for its innovations in livestock. There, the researchers discovered the missing connection — the tooth of a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same plague bacteria found in humans from that area. Finding infected livestock suggests that the domesticated sheep served as a bridge between the humans and infected wild animals, said Dr. Taylor Hermes, a study coauthor and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. 'We're sort of unveiling this in real time and trying to get a sense for how Bronze Age nomadic herders out in the Eurasian Steppe were setting the stage for disease transmission that potentially led to impacts elsewhere,' Hermes said, 'not only in later in time, but also in a much more distant, distant landscape.' During this time within the Eurasian Steppe, as many as 20% of the bodies in some cemeteries are those of people who were infected with, and most likely died from, the plague, making it an extremely pervasive disease, Hermes said. While livestock are seemingly a part of what made the disease so widespread, they are only one piece of the puzzle. The identification of the bacterial lineage in an animal opens new avenues for researching this disease's evolution as well as the later lineage that caused the Black Death in Europe and the plague that's still around today, he added. 'It's not surprising, but it is VERY cool to see (the DNA) isolated from an ancient animal. It's extremely difficult to find it in humans and even more so in animal remains, so this is really interesting and significant,' Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in an email. Poinar was not involved with the study. It is likely that humans and animals were passing the strains back and forth, but it isn't clear how they did so — or how sheep were infected in the first place. It is possible sheep picked up the bacteria through a food or water source and then transmitted the disease to humans via the animal's contaminated meat, he added. 'I think it shows how extremely successful (if you want to label it that way) this particular pathogen has been,' Poinar added. He, as well as the study's authors, said they hope that further research uncovers other animals infected with the ancient strain to further the understanding of the disease's spread and evolution. Ancient plague to modern plague While the plague lineage that persisted during the Bronze Age is extinct, Yersinia pestis is still around in parts of Africa and Asia as well as the western United States, Brazil and Peru. But it's rare to encounter the bacteria, with only 1,000 to 2,000 cases of plague annually worldwide. There is no need for alarm when it comes to dealing with livestock and pets, Hermes said. The findings are a reminder that animals carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. Be cautious when cooking meat, or to take care when bitten by an animal, he added. 'The takeaway is that humans aren't alone in disease, and this has been true for thousands of years. The ways we are drastically changing our environment and how wild and domesticated animals are connected to us have the potential to change how disease can come into our communities,' Light-Maka said. 'And if you see a dead prairie dog, maybe don't go and touch it.' Taylor Nicioli is a freelance journalist based in New York. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Solve the daily Crossword
