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Researchers have identified Yersinia pestis as the pathogen responsible for the Plague of Justinian, the world’s first recorded pandemic that took place from 541-549.
A team of scientists from the University of South Florida and Florida Atlantic University, with collaborators in India and Australia, identified the microbe in a mass grave at the ancient city of Jerash, Jordan.
Jerash is located just 200 miles from ancient Pelusium in Egypt, which was the pandemic’s epicentre.
Historical records tell us that the Plague of Justinian first appeared in Pelusium (present day Tell el-Farama) in Egypt before spreading throughout the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire.
“While traces of Y. pestis had previously been recovered thousands of miles away in small western European villages, no evidence had ever been found within the empire itself or near the heart of the pandemic,” a statement from the University of South Florida said.
The researchers used ancient DNA techniques to recover and sequence genetic material from eight human teeth excavated from burial chambers beneath the former Roman hippodrome in Jerash.
Genomic analysis showed that the plague victims carried nearly identical strains of Y. pestis.
This provided an important conclusion. The microbe was present within the Byzantine Empire between AD 550-660.
“That genetic uniformity suggests a rapid, devastating outbreak consistent with historical descriptions of a plague causing mass death,” the statement noted.
The research team came out with not one but two studies on the subject. The second paper found that the pathogen had been circulating across Eurasia centuries before the Plague of Justinian.
“Ancient DNA (aDNA) evidence from the Neolithic and Bronze Age spans wide regions from Central Europe to Central Asia, indicating that Y. pestis circulated broadly across Eurasia millennia before historically documented pandemics,” it adds.
Plague outbreaks have been recurrent across the world throughout history. The researchers found that there was no one single origin of the 14th century Black Death, which occurred several hundred years after the Plague of Justinian as well as outbreaks to the present day.
“Our phylogenetic analysis of Y. pestis genomes reveals deep Eurasian origins, broad global diversity, and complex evolutionary dynamics shaped by both human activity and environmental reservoirs. The inclusion of ancient genomes shows that plague pandemics arose through repeated, regionally distinct events—not a single origin.”
This pattern is starkly different from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (COVID-19), according to the researchers. This pandemic originated from a single spillover event and evolved primarily through human-to-human transmission.
“The research underscores that pandemics are not singular historical catastrophes, but repeating biological events driven by human congregation, mobility and environmental change — themes that remain relevant today,” the statement by the University of South Florida said.
Genetic Evidence of Yersinia pestis from the First Pandemic has been published in the journal Genes while Ancient Origins and Global Diversity of Plague: Genomic Evidence for Deep Eurasian Reservoirs and Recurrent Emergence has been published in the journal Pathogens.