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Child Graves Near Lake Baikal Reveal Plague’s Deadly Reach 5,500 Years Ago
A prehistoric Lake Baikal plague outbreak is no longer just a theory drawn from scattered graves. Ancient DNA from children buried near the Angara River in southeastern Siberia shows that Yersinia pestis was killing hunter-gatherer communities around 5,500 years ago, long before the Black Death or the first cities usually linked to epidemic disease. Three…
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DNA Study Reveals the True Origins and Ritual Secrets of Shimao, China’s Enigmatic Neolithic City
For decades, the stone walls of Shimao—one of the largest and most imposing Neolithic settlements in northern China—have guarded a silence that archaeology alone could not fully break. Now, a landmark genomic study published in Nature has begun to decode that silence, revealing who the people of Shimao were, how their society worked, and why…