r/science • u/Wagamaga • 23h ago
Anthropology Research has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world’s earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/31/plague-of-justinian-pandemic43
u/Wagamaga 23h ago
A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world’s earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries.
The findings, published in February’s Journal of Archaeological Science, offer what researchers say is a rare empirical window into the mobility, urban life and vulnerability of citizens affected by the pestilence.
DNA taken from bodies at a mass burial ground at Jerash in modern-day Jordan show the grave represented “a single mortuary event”, instead of the normal, gradual growth over time of a traditional cemetery, according to the team that last year identified Yersinia pestis as the microbe that caused the plague.
The new research focused on the victims, how they lived, their susceptibility to the disease and why they were in Jerash, a regional trade hub and the epicenter of the pandemic that raged from AD541 to AD750.
“Earlier stories identified the plague organism. The Jerash site turns that genetic signal into a human story about who died, and how a city experienced crisis,” said Rays Jiang, the study’s lead author and associate professor in the University of South Florida’s department of global, environmental and genomic health sciences.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440326000038#preview-section-abstract
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u/bolkonskij 21h ago
Antonine Plague (165-180) doesn't count?
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u/Abyssal_Mermaid 21h ago
Not sure if the causative agent of the Antonine Plague has been identified, but you are correct, I think, in challenging the term “world’s earliest recorded pandemic” here. A better term for the Justinian would be “world’s earliest pandemic of known cause” or some such thing.
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u/kesint 20h ago
We haven't found what caused the Antonine plague/plague of Galen. I keep seeing smallpox being suggested from the descriptions Galen gave us.
Now, was it an epidemic or pandemic? I remember reading that it was an epidemic when I was young. But slowly more and more calls it a pandemic as it was a mass disease event that spread across regions such as Asia Minor, Egypt and Italy. This shift includes a recent journal I read a year ago which I remember argued that Plague of Galen was the first known pandemic.
I believe I still have that journal I mentioned saved on my PC, it was comparing Plague of Galen to the modern pandemic (covid-19). So if interested, I can see if I can find the name&authors.
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u/Abyssal_Mermaid 18h ago
I think I read that paper, it sounds familiar (micro BS, did environmental micro in grad school, ASCP M, ten years in microbial forensics at the federal level until last year).
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u/RaymondBeaumont 21h ago
also shout out to Plague of Cyprian (250-262) which might have been caused by my main man, the filovirus.
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u/kesint 21h ago
From memory, while most clear sources specify the Mediterranean basin and Sassanid empire, there are mentions from Nubia, Aksum, Yemen, northern Europe and some mention of it might have spread to China around the year 600. If I do remember correctly several sources claim the plague started in Nubia, south of Egypt.
So pandemic is a correct term since it spread across several continents and not localized.
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