All posts by Archaeology World Team

AFRICA, WORLD

Archaeologists have unearthed two early Aksumite Churches in Africa

Archaeologists have unearthed two early Aksumite Churches in Africa

New discoveries in the port city of Adulis on Eritrea’s Red Sea coast show that two ancient churches discovered more than a century ago were built during the reign of the legendary Kingdom of Aksum, which ruled Northeast Africa for the entire first millennium AD.

The two ancient religious structures have finally been dated to the mid-1st millennium AD, thanks to a detailed analysis performed by a team of archaeologists from the Vatican-sponsored Pontificio Instituto di Archeologia Cristiana, with dates of construction beginning no later than the 6th and 7th centuries, respectively.

The Aksumite Kingdom arose in the former territories of the fallen D’mt Kingdom in the mid-first century AD.

From an early stage, the kingdom played an important role in the transcontinental trade route between Rome and India, rising to become one of the most powerful empires of late antiquity.

Archaeologists excavating at Adulis’ port discovered two churches built after the kingdom’s conversion to Christianity in the 4th century AD. One of the churches is a large cathedral with the remains of a baptistry, while the other is smaller but has a ring of columns that supports a dome roof.

Excavation of one of the early churches found in Adulis, which likely served as the city’s cathedral.

Like their Mediterranean neighbor, the Aksumite leader—King Ezana—converted to Christianity in the 4th century AD but securely dated churches from this period are rare.

The churches incorporate elements from a variety of traditions, reflecting the various influences on the kingdom’s conversion. The domed church is one of a kind in the Aksumite Kingdom, and it appears to be inspired by Byzantine architecture. Meanwhile, the cathedral is built on a large platform in the Aksumite tradition.

To accurately date the structures, the researchers used modern scientific methods such as radiocarbon dating on materials recovered from both sites.

Adulis sector 4 – eastern church

“This study provides one of the first examples of Aksumite churches excavated with modern methods and chronological data coming from modern dating methods,” said Dr. Gabriele Castiglia.

In a study published in the journal Antiquity, the cathedral was built between AD 400 and 535, while the domed church was built between AD 480 and 625. Both structures are some of the earliest Christian churches from the Aksumite Kingdom, and the oldest known outside the capital’s heartlands.

From this vantage point, the construction of these two striking and ambitious structures in a port city far from the Aksumite capital suggests that Christianity spread relatively quickly throughout the kingdom.

Work on the first of the two structures may have begun less than a century after King Ezana’s conversion, indicating that the people of the region were open to new spiritual belief systems.

Excavations at the domed church, revealed a room near the entrance.

With the arrival of Islam, the churches fell into decline and disuse; however, they were later re-appropriated as a Muslim burial ground, indicating that the region’s conversion to Islam was also a multicultural phenomenon, with local customs mixed with the new religion.

“This is one of the first times we have the material evidence of the re-appropriation of a Christian sacred space by the Islamic community,” said Dr. Castiglia.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Archaeologists uncover an ancient mosaic of the living room of brutal Publius Vedius Pollio

Archaeologists uncover an ancient mosaic of the living room of brutal Publius Vedius Pollio

Archaeologists uncover an ancient mosaic of the living room of brutal Publius Vedius Pollio

In the Pausilypon Archaeological Park, archaeologists from the University of Naples’ “L’Orientale” uncovered an ancient mosaic. The park is located in Posillipo, which was an elite quarter of Naples in modern-day Italy during the Roman period.

The park is accessible via the 770-meter-long “Grotta Seiano” tunnel, which was excavated during the Roman period.

This park consists of ancient structures that face the sea but actually extend far below the sea’s surface. In fact, the Pausilypon Archaeological-Environmental Park shares boundaries with the Gaiola Sunken Park.

Pausilypo (“Pausilypon” in ancient Greek means “relieving from pain”) was a luxurious zone where the most famous people of the ancient Roman world, such as senators and wealthy cavaliers, had their extravagant villas.

The main attraction of the park is the villa of Publius Vedius Pollio, Emperor Augustus’ right hand, which was built in the first century B.C. This wealthy Roman cavalier was born into a freed slave family but was best known for his exploits with his own slaves.

He became infamous for his luxurious tastes and cruelty to his slaves – when they displeased him, he supposedly had them fed to lampreys in an eel pond. In addition to his villa, he built a theater that could seat 2000 people, an Odeon for small shows, a Nymphaeum, and a spa complex.

When Publius Vedius Pollio’s slave broke a crystal cup, he sentenced him to death and insisted that he be thrown into a pool of moray eels. Emperor Augustus, a close friend of Pollio, told the self-made gagillionaire to spare the slave’s life. Augustus then ordered all Pollio’s expensive drinking vessels smashed and his pool filled in.

Pollio left his estate to Augustus after his death in 15 BC, along with instructions to erect a suitable monument on the site. Up until the time of Hadrian, who passed away in AD 138, the villa was owned by the empire and passed from one emperor to the next.

A mosaic floor from the villa’s initial construction phase has been discovered by archaeologists from the University of Naples “L’Orientale.”

The mosaic, which is composed of tiny white tesserae with a double black frame, was discovered purposefully buried beneath renovation projects that Augustus had ordered following Vedius’s passing.

Stratigraphic dating is still missing, but based on the style that hall could date back to the late Republican age or Augustan at the latest”, says Marco Giglio, of the L’Orientale University of Naples, who led the excavation brought to light.

A refined white mosaic carpet with a double black frame delimits the living room overlooking the sea of Naples.

AFRICA, NIGERIA, WORLD

Cambridge University Will Repatriate Benin Bronzes

Cambridge University Will Repatriate Benin Bronzes

Cambridge University Will Repatriate Benin Bronzes
The university said it was “working with the commission to finalise next steps” regarding the return of the objects

The Charity Commission has granted consent for the University of Cambridge to return 116 artefacts to Nigeria.

The objects, known as the Benin Bronzes, were taken by British armed forces during the sacking of Benin City in 1897, the university said.

The legal ownership of the items will be transferred to the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments. The Charity Commission concluded the university was “under a moral obligation” to return the artefacts.

A spokesperson for the university said it was “working with the commission to finalise next steps regarding these Benin Bronzes”.

The university said some items would remain in Cambridge on loan

The university said the 1897 attack was “mounted by Britain in response to a violent trade dispute”.

“British forces burned the city’s palace and exiled Benin’s Oba, or king,” the university said.

“Several thousand brasses and other artefacts – collectively known as the ‘Benin Bronzes’ – were taken by the British, and subsequently sold off in London to recoup the costs of the military mission.”

The artefacts ended up dispersed across many museums in the UK, the rest of Europe, and the US.

The university said 116 of the items were at its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Prof Nicholas Thomas, director of the museum, said: “Across the international museum sector, there is growing recognition that illegitimately acquired artefacts should be returned to their countries of origin.”

A brass penannular bracelet is one of the items at the Cambridge museum

The university said it hosted the Benin Dialogue Group in 2017 and had visited Benin City before receiving a formal claim from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeria in January 2022.

The university supported the claim for the items to be returned to the west African country and submitted the case to the Charity Commission for authorisation in July.

The commission has granted consent for the transfer.

A spokesman for the commission said it “carefully” assessed the matter.

“The trustees made the decision to transfer the artefacts, concluding that they were under a moral obligation to take this step,” he said.

A spokesperson for the university said some of the artefacts would remain in Cambridge on “extended loan, ensuring that this West African civilisation continues to be represented in the museum’s displays, and in teaching for school groups”.

“Those that return physically will be transferred to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, as is required legally by the Republic of Nigeria – an approach formally supported by the Oba of Benin.”

AFRICA, TANZANIA, WORLD

Study Suggests Walking May Be Linked to Treetop Foraging

Study Suggests Walking May Be Linked to Treetop Foraging

Study Suggests Walking May Be Linked to Treetop Foraging
An adult male chimpanzee walks upright to navigate flexible branches in the open canopy, in behaviour characteristic of the Issa Valley savanna-mosaic habitat.

The ancestors of humans may have begun moving on two legs to forage for food among the treetops in open habitat, researchers have suggested, contradicting the idea that the behaviour arose as an adaptation to spending more time on the ground.

The origins of bipedalism in hominins around 7m years ago has long been thought to be linked to a shift in environment, when dense forests began to give way to more open woodland and grassland habitats.

In such conditions, it has been argued, our ancestors would have spent more time on the ground than in the trees, and been able to move more efficiently on two legs.

But now researchers studying chimpanzees in Tanzania say that trait may have different origins. “I think we have long told this very logical story, that at least our data don’t really support,” said Dr Alex Piel, a biological anthropologist at University College London and a co-author of the research.

Writing in the journal Science Advances, the researchers report how they spent 15 months studying 13 chimpanzees living in Issa Valley in western Tanzania, an environment similar to that experienced by our ancient ancestors.

The results reveal that these chimpanzees spent a greater proportion of their time on the ground, and in movement, when in an open environment of woodland and grasses than in densely forested parts of the same area.

However, even in the open environment, the proportion of time the chimpanzees spent on the ground was similar to that previously recorded for other populations of the apes living in densely forested areas, including Gombe and Mahale.

“Even though we have far fewer trees, [the chimps are] no more terrestrial,” said Piel.

The team then combined the data for the different environments in Issa Valley and analysed how often the chimpanzees either stood or moved on two feet.

The results reveal that while bipedal behaviour accounted for less than 1% of recorded postures, only 14% related to chimpanzees on the ground.

“Most of the time that they are on two legs is in the trees,” said Piel, adding that the behaviour, at least amid the branches, appears to be most commonly linked to foraging for food.

Rhianna Drummond-Clarke, first author of the research from the University of Kent, said that open woodland could favour bipedalism in chimpanzees, and by extension early human ancestors, because such environments have more sparsely distributed trees than dense forests.

“[Bipedalism may help them] safely and effectively navigate the flexible branches and access as many fruits as possible when they find them,” she said.

The team says that while the study cannot prove that our human ancestors showed the same patterns of bipedal behaviour, it calls into question common assumptions of how humans ended up walking on two legs, and suggests that trees continued to play a role in our evolutionary story even as the environment shifted.

“Rather than time on the ground stimulating [bipedalism], it may have catalysed it, but it was already there,” said Piel. “And that fits perfectly with the fossil record because all the all these early hominins have both arboreal and terrestrial adaptations.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Did the Aztecs Use Mountains to Track the Sun?

Did the Aztecs Use Mountains to Track the Sun?

Did the Aztecs Use Mountains to Track the Sun?
Aztec farming calendar accurately tracked seasons, leap years

Without clocks or modern tools, ancient Mexicans watched the sun to maintain a farming calendar that precisely tracked seasons and even adjusted for leap years.

Before the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico’s agricultural system fed a population that was extraordinarily large for the time.  Whereas Seville, the largest urban center in Spain, had a population of fewer than 50,000, the Basin, now known as Mexico City, was home to as many as 3 million people.  

To feed so many people in a region with a dry spring and summer monsoons required advanced understanding of when seasonal variations in weather would arrive.

Rising sun seen from the stone causeway on Mount Tlaloc in Mexico.

Planting too early, or too late, could have proved disastrous. The failure of any calendar to adjust for leap-year fluctuations could also have led to crop failure.

Though colonial chroniclers documented the use of a calendar, it was not previously understood how the Mexica, or Aztecs, were able to achieve such accuracy.

New UC Riverside research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates how they did it. They used the mountains of the Basin as a solar observatory, keeping track of the sunrise against the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

“We concluded they must have stood at a single spot, looking eastwards from one day to another, to tell the time of year by watching the rising sun,” said Exequiel Ezcurra, distinguished UCR professor of ecology who led the research. 

Stone causeway atop Mount Tlaloc, Mexico.

To find that spot, the researchers studied Mexica manuscripts. These ancient texts referred to Mount Tlaloc, which lies east of the Basin.

The research team explored the high mountains around the Basin and a temple at the mountain’s summit.

Using astronomical computer models, they confirmed that a long causeway structure at the temple aligns with the rising sun on Feb. 24, the first day of the Aztec new year.

“Our hypothesis is that they used the whole Valley of Mexico. Their working instrument was the Basin itself. When the sun rose at a landmark point behind the Sierras, they knew it was time to start planting,” Ezcurra said.

The sun, as viewed from a fixed point on Earth, does not follow the same trajectory every day. In winter, it runs south of the celestial equator and rises toward the southeast. As summer approaches, because of the Earth’s tilt, sunrise moves northeast, a phenomenon called solar declination. 

This study may be the first to demonstrate how the Mexica were able to keep time using this principle, the sun, and the mountains as guiding landmarks.

Though some may be familiar with the “Aztec calendar,” that is an incorrect name given to the Sun Stone, arguably the most famous work of Aztec sculpture used solely for ritual and ceremonial purposes. 

“It did not have any practical use as a celestial observatory. Think of it as a monument, like Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square or Lincoln’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.,” Ezcurra said. 

Learning about Aztec tools that did have practical use offers a lesson about the importance of using a variety of methods to solve questions about the natural world. 

“The same goals can be achieved in different ways. It can be difficult to see that sometimes. We don’t always need to rely solely on modern technology,” Ezcurra said. “The Aztecs were just as good or better as the Europeans at keeping time, using their own methods.”

The Aztec observatory could also have a more modern function, according to Ezcurra.

Comparing old images of the Basin of Mexico to current ones shows how the forest is slowly climbing up Mount Tlaloc, likely as a result of an increase in average temperatures at lower elevation. 

“In the 1940s the tree line was way below the summit. Now there are trees growing in the summit itself,” Ezcurra said. “What was an observatory for the ancients could also be an observatory for the 21st century, to understand global climate changes.”

DENMARK, EUROPE, WORLD

5,000-year-old ‘bog body’ found in Denmark may be a human sacrifice victim

5,000-year-old ‘bog body’ found in Denmark may be a human sacrifice victim

5,000-year-old 'bog body' found in Denmark may be a human sacrifice victim
The archaeologists first found the bones from a human leg, and then a pelvis and a lower jaw with some teeth still attached.

Archaeologists have discovered the ancient skeletal remains of a so-called bog body in Denmark near the remnants of a flint ax and animal bones, clues that suggest this person was ritually sacrificed more than 5,000 years ago. 

Little is known so far about the supposed victim, including the person’s sex and age at the time of death. But the researchers think the body was deliberately placed in the bog during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.

“That’s the early phase of the Danish Neolithic,” said excavation leader Emil Struve, an archaeologist and curator at the ROMU museums in Roskilde. “We know that traditions of human sacrifices date back that far — we have other examples of it.”

Dozens of so-called bog bodies have been found throughout northwestern Europe — particularly in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, where human sacrifices in bogs seem to have persisted for several thousand years.

“In our area here, we have several different bog bodies,” Struve told Live Science. “It’s an ongoing tradition that goes back all the way to the Neolithic.”

The archaeologists hope that wear on the teeth could indicate the person’s age when they died, and that the teeth themselves may contain ancient DNA.

Ancient bones

The ROMU archaeological team found the latest set of bones in October ahead of the construction of a housing development. The site, which has now been drained, had been a bog near the town of Stenløse, on the large island of Zealand and just northwest of the Danish capital Copenhagen. Danish law requires archaeologists to examine all land that’s to be built on, and the first bones of the Stenløse bog body were found during a test excavation at the site, Struve said. 

The site near Stenløse was originally a bog, but it’s been drained for use as farmland. A housing development is due to be built there next year.

The archaeologists will now fully excavate the site in the spring, when the ground has thawed after winter. But the initial excavations have revealed leg bones, a pelvis and part of a lower jaw with some teeth still attached. The other parts of the body lay outside a protective layer of peat in the bog and were not preserved, he noted.

Several animal bones found near the human remains indicate this was an area of the bog used for rituals.

Struve hopes that the sex of the body can be determined based on the pelvis and that wear on the teeth may indicate the individual’s age. In addition, the teeth could be sources of ancient DNA, which might reveal even more about the person’s identity, he said.

Archaeologists from the ROMU museums supervised the digger making the initial test trench at the site near Stenløse.

Bog bodies

Struve said the flint ax-head found near the body was not polished after it was made and may have never been used, and so it seems likely that this, too, was a deliberate offering.

A flint axe head found next to the human remains seems never to have been used; its in a style that dates to about 3600 B.C.

The oldest bog body in the world, known as Koelbjerg Man, was found in Denmark in the 1940s and may date to 10,000 years ago, while others date to the Iron Age in the region from about 2,500 years ago. One of the most famous and best-preserved bog bodies is Tollund Man, who was found on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula in 1950 and is thought to have been sacrificed in about 400 B.C.

A few of the bog bodies seem to have been accident victims who drowned after they fell in the water, but archaeologists think most were killed deliberately, perhaps as human sacrifices at times of famines or other disasters.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green, a professor emeritus of history, archaeology and religion at Cardiff University in the U.K. and the author of the book “Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe’s Ancient Mystery” (Thames & Hudson, 2015), said ancient people were likely well aware that bogs could preserve bodies.

“If you put a body in the bog, it would not decay — it would stay between the worlds of the living and the dead,” she told NBC News.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Human ‘bog bones’ discovered at a Stone Age campsite in Germany

Human ‘bog bones’ discovered at a Stone Age campsite in Germany

Human 'bog bones' discovered at a Stone Age campsite in Germany
Archaeologists think this was a temporary campsite on the shore of an ancient lake that has now silted up; it was used for roasting hazelnuts and for spearing fish, and the bones were probably from someone who died nearby.

Archaeologists in northern Germany have unearthed 10,000-year-old cremated bones at a Stone Age lakeside campsite that was once used for spearing fish and roasting hazelnuts, major food sources for groups of hunter-gatherers at that time.

The site is the earliest known burial in northern Germany, and the discovery marks the first time human remains have been found at Duvensee bog in the Schleswig-Holstein region, where dozens of campsites from the Mesolithic era or Middle Stone Age (roughly between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago) have been found.

Hazelnuts were a big attraction in the area because Mesolithic people could gather and roast them, Harald Lübke, an archaeologist at the Center for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, an agency of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museums Foundation, told Live Science.

The campsites changed over time, the research shows. “In the beginning, we have only small hazelnut roasting hearths, and in the later sites, they become much bigger” — possibly a consequence of hazel trees becoming more widespread as the environment changed.

Archaeologists think Duvensee was a lake at that time, and that Mesolithic campsites on islands and the shore were used by hunter-gatherers who visited there in the fall to harvest hazelnuts.

The burial was found during excavations earlier this month at a site first identified in the late 1980s by archaeologist Klaus Bokelmann and his students, who found worked flints there not during a formal excavation, but during a barbecue at a house on the edge of a nearby village, Lübke said.

“Because the sausages were not ready, Bokelmann told his students that if they found anything [in the bog nearby], then he would give them a bottle of Champagne,” he said. “And when they came back, they had a lot of flint artifacts.” 

The cremated bones date from about 10,500 years ago, during the Mesolithic era. They are the first human remains found at any of the Mesolithic sites at the Duvensee bog.

Ancient lake

The burial site is near at least six Mesolithic campsites, which would have been on the shores of the ancient lake at Duvensee, Lübke said.

The first sites investigated by Bokelmann in the 1980s were on islands that would have been near the western shore of the lake, which has completely silted up over the last 8,000 years or so, and formed a peat bog, called a “moor” in Germany.

Archaeologists have discovered mats made of bark for sitting on the damp soil, pieces of worked flint, and the remains of many Mesolithic fireplaces for roasting hazelnuts, but they haven’t unearthed any burials at the island sites.

“Maybe they didn’t bury people on the islands but only at the sites on the lake border, which seem to have had a different kind of function,” Lübke said.

Unlike during the later Mesolithic era, when specific areas were set aside for the burial of the dead, at this time it seemed the dead were buried near where they died, he said. Significantly, the body was cremated before its burial at the Duvensee site, like other burials of approximately the same age near Hammelev in southern Denmark, which is about 120 miles (195 kilometers) to the north. 

Only pieces of the largest bones were left after the cremation, and it’s not clear if they were wrapped in hide or bark before they were buried. In any case, “burning the body seems to be a central part of burial rituals at this time,” Lübke said.

The site where the cremated bones were found was identified in the 1980s when fragments of worked flints were found there, but it wasn’t excavated until this summer.

Changing landscape

As well as roasting hazelnuts and burning bodies — both of which are activities utilizing fire — Mesolithic people used the lakeside campgrounds for spearing fish, according to the discovery of several bone points crafted for that purpose that were found at the site.

Flint fragments also have been found throughout the area, although flint doesn’t occur naturally there, suggesting that Mesolithic people repaired their tools and hunting weapons in this place during the annual hazelnut harvest in the fall, Lübke said.

The Duvensee bog is among the most important archaeological regions in northern Europe; dozens of Mesolithic sites have been found there since 1923, and most of them since the 1980s.

The Mesolithic sites at Duvensee are about the same age as the Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, and some of the artifacts found there are very similar, Lübke said.

From that time until about 8,000 years ago, the Schleswig-Holstein region and Britain were connected by a now-submerged region called Doggerland, and it’s likely that Mesolithic groups would have shared technologies, he said.

The researchers now plan to carry out further excavations at the site of the Mesolithic burial, to determine what other activities took place there.

Ulf Ickerodt, head of Schleswig-Holstein’s State Archaeology Department, said the latest find at Duvensee is of global significance.

“It speaks to the long tradition of archaeological research in Schleswig-Holstein in the expiration of moors and wetlands,” he told Live Science in an email. “The present find advances itself and the landscape around it to something spectacular.”

But he noted that the preservation of organic finds in the Duvensee region is threatened by climatic changes that could result in heavy rain and flooding, or dry periods.

Both types of changes could threaten archaeological features in the area, so archaeologists are working to recover any finds and to develop strategies for better managing the area in the face of a changing climate, Ickerodt said.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Study Hints at Heavy Toll of Illness in a Medieval German Village

Study Hints at Heavy Toll of Illness in a Medieval German Village

More than one-third of the individuals buried in an early medieval cemetery in Germany suffered from infectious diseases, a new study reveals.

Study Hints at Heavy Toll of Illness in a Medieval German Village
The skull of a boy with a proven triple infection of hepatitis B, parvovirus B19, and Mycobacterium leprae.

Researchers from Kiel University in Germany examined the DNA and skeletal remains of 70 people who were buried in the community cemetery located in Lauchheim Mittelhofen, a town in what is now present-day Germany.

All of the burials took place sometime during the Merovingian period (between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D.). The team discovered that more than 30% of the deceased had either hepatitis B; parvovirus B19(which can lead to a rash); variola viru (the virus that causes smallpox); or Mycobacterium leprae (one of the two bacteria that causes leprosy. Seven of the infected individuals had a combination of two of the illnesses.

Using DNA extracted from the roots of each individual’s teeth, the researchers determined what illnesses each person had, if any. They also examined the bones of the deceased, although “only some diseases leave clear traces on the bones,” Ben Krause-Kyora, one of the study’s co-authors and a biochemist and archaeologist at Kiel University, told Live Science in an email.

“The roots of the teeth are well supplied with blood during their lifetime, so the pathogens we find in them probably circulated in the bloodstream,” Krause-Kyora said. “It takes a certain amount of time for bone to remodel in response to an infection. This is the case, for example, with leprosy, a relatively slow-progressing disease.”

In terms of hepatitis B, which showed up in DNA rather than the skeletal remains, the illness “tends to lead to liver inflammation and, in rare cases, to liver failure or liver cancer,” Krause-Kyora said. “Parvovirus and also smallpox don’t leave any traces.

In the case of the variant of this ancient smallpox, it’s also unclear how exactly it worked, as it’s already genetically different from the typical smallpox of modern times.” 

He added, “We wanted to show which pathogens circulated in an early medieval population and how high the infection rates were.”

One skeleton in particular stood out amongst the burials: a young male who suffered from three pathogens, which included hepatitis B, parvovirus B19 and M. leprae.

“[The boy] is also special because leprosy was not yet widespread north of the Alps in the 7th and 8th centuries,” Krause-Kyora said, “so we can also learn something about the origin of this later pandemic from the genome of the leprosy pathogen M. leprae” and how it evolved over the coming centuries. 

So, why were so many people in this small, rural community afflicted by such a variety of illnesses? Researchers concluded that a number of factors could’ve been at play, such as climate change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age (the sixth and seventh centuries A.D.), which led to widespread crop failures and famine, Krause-Kyora said.

“Through climate reconstructions, we know of a general climate deterioration” during this time period, Krause-Kyora said, adding that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere cooled by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) on average.

“This phase of bad climate could also have led to a general weakening of the population through crop failure,” he said. “This increased susceptibility to disease could’ve made it possible for diseases to jump from animals to humans and adapt to them as new hosts.

In addition, the diseases can also spread more widely in new populations. This could be a plausible explanation of how pathogens became established in human populations and then led to large pandemic outbreaks after several centuries in the Middle Ages.”

The findings were published Dec. 12 in the journal Genome Biology.