illustration of skull-like silhouette with a glowing tooth at its center. DNA strands radiate outward from the tooth, while subtle bacteria-like shapes hint at ancient plague research

Illustration: Raven Jiang

Jun 17th 2026|5 min read

IN 2011 A team of geneticists managed to recover centuries-old DNA from the teeth of bodies that had been buried in East Smithfield, a medieval cemetery in London. Besides human DNA, they were able to isolate genetic material from Yersinia pestis, the species of bacterium that causes plague. This let them confirm what historians had long suspected but had never quite been able to prove: that the Black Death, which killed perhaps half of Europe’s population between 1346 and 1353, was indeed an outbreak of plague.

Baby bottle with measurement markings and a smiling pink nipple on a blue background.

Ancient DNA is rewriting the history of plague