Discovering that chytrid fungi cause chytridiomycosis in amphibians represented a paradigm
shift in our understanding of how emerging infectious diseases contribute to global patterns …

SUMMARY The Gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis is responsible for deadly plague, a
zoonotic disease established in stable foci in the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. Its …

The origin of the medieval Black Death pandemic (ad 1346–1353) has been a topic of
continuous investigation because of the pandemic's extensive demographic impact and long …

EnteroBase is an integrated software environment that supports the identification of global
population structures within several bacterial genera that include pathogens. Here, we …

For thousands of years the Eurasian steppes have been a centre of human migrations and
cultural change. Here we sequence the genomes of 137 ancient humans (about 1× average …

Plague is a vector-borne disease caused by Yersinia pestis. Transmitted by fleas from
rodent reservoirs, Y. pestis emerged< 6000 years ago from an enteric bacterial ancestor …

In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes
in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange …

Summary Between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, many Neolithic societies declined
throughout western Eurasia due to a combination of factors that are still largely debated …

Over the past decade, a genomics revolution, made possible through the development of
high-throughput sequencing, has triggered considerable progress in the study of ancient …

The bacteria Yersinia pestis is the etiological agent of plague and has caused human
pandemics with millions of deaths in historic times. How and when it originated remains …