An old life must end for a new life to begin. For that reason, life on our planet has been closely linked to death and illness from the very beginning, and disease has been humanity’s constant companion for millennia. Especially after human beings began to settle in one place, developing agriculture and practising animal husbandry, and thus living in larger communities and coming into contact with animals, diseases are likely not only to have been an everyday occurrence, but also to have led to epidemics. The new lifestyle meant that infectious diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi and other pathogens could easily be transmitted from animals to humans and vice versa (zoonotic diseases).

Unlike more recent history, which is documented in written records, works of art and so on, research into diseases and epidemics in the early, preliterate days of human history relies almost entirely on material evidence and particularly human or animal remains. For some time now, it has been possible to identify some diseases, or signs of deficiency and wear, in skeletal remains using microscopy, x-rays or computer tomography. In recent years it has also become possible to identify infectious diseases using genetic analysis.

In prehistoric times, inflammatory dental diseases, mainly caused by tooth decay or tartar, were very common. Unlike today, they could be so severe that they extended far into the jawbone and could even lead to death. In some circumstances, abscesses at the tip of a tooth’s root could progress to create a channel leading into the nasal cavity, causing persistent pain and inflammation. In addition, non-natural causes of death have been found, such as head trauma resulting from blows with stone axes, or bones penetrated by arrowheads (Haak et al. 2008; Conrad & Teegen 2009).

These examples show clearly that even in the third millennium BC, i.e. between 3000 and 2000 BC, human beings must have been constantly beset by disease. At the time, social and cultural developments in Mesopotamia and on the Nile and Indus were reaching their first peak; complex state structures were developing hand in hand with the construction of large towns and the use of writing. In Central Europe, the same period was characterised by processes of continual change extending from the Neolithic Age, when agriculture and animal husbandry began to be established, to the Bronze Age. While the archaeological groups of the fourth millennium BC tended to be restricted to specific regions, the third millennium BC featured two large-scale archaeological complexes. The Corded Ware culture (c. 2750–2200 BC) fanned out from various points extending from Ukraine to Switzerland, while the slightly later Bell Beaker culture (c. 2500–2150 BC) stretched from Portugal to Poland, also with various centres.

Apart from the use of beakers, another factor uniting the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures was their burial rites, both revolving around gendered burial practices that mirrored one another exactly. As a rule, the dead were buried on their side in a crouched position. In the Corded Ware culture, men usually lay on their right side and women on their left side, whereas women from the Bell Beaker culture were placed on their right side and the men on their left side. The rise of this burial practice at the start of the third millennium BC is linked to a series of graves that already show signs of this gendered positioning but do not yet contain any pottery from the Corded Ware culture.

One such gravesite was excavated in 1998 to the south of Großstorkwitz, a district roughly 18 km to the south of Leipzig, by the Saxon Archaeological Heritage Office (LfA) in the lead-up to a utility conduit being laid. Carbon-14 dating quickly showed that the man, aged between 35 and 45, died between 2848 and 2572 BC. He was buried on his right-hand side lying from west to east and facing south, in the manner typical of Corded Ware graves. The only item buried with him was a flint blade. Graves from this early part of the third millennium BC are themselves a rarity in Saxony, but that was not all. An analysis of the man’s teeth, carried out in 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, revealed a particular surprise. Traces of the genetic material (DNA) of Yersinia pestis were found inside his bottom right-hand molar (Andrades Valtueña et al. 2022). This bacterium causes the disease we famously now know as the plague, though it cannot be said for sure whether the man actually died of the plague.

A similarly ancient case of the plague is known from the Bohemian village of Vliněves, in the Czech Republic to the north of Prague. This, too, is a 40- to 60-year-old man, who was given a right-facing crouched inhumation between roughly 2885 and 2663 BC, buried with flint blades. The two cases fit remarkably well into a series of other, similarly ancient cases of the plague known from south-east Europe (Rascovan et al. 2019), the North Caucasian steppe, southern Siberia and Lake Baikal. They fit not only into the timeline and geography but also in terms of phylogenetics (the study of species’ evolution and their relationship to other groups of organisms). Although further evidence has been found locating the plague in Central Europe in the third millennium BC, such cases are as yet isolated, making it hard to judge how seriously the disease affected communities at that time.

Interestingly, the man from Großstorkwitz has a far higher number of Steppe-related genes compared with both earlier pastoralist groups from the fourth millennium BC and those buried slightly later with Corded Ware vessels. His characteristic genetic signature thus indicates that his ancestors probably came from the eastern Steppe region, or that occupied by the Yamnaya culture, some four or five generations before. The Yamnaya culture includes various groups of nomadic peoples in the area from the north of the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, who largely lived from livestock farming and herding. Interestingly, the culture already features the key characteristics of the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures found in Europe: single graves and the ideal of the warrior. Research is being carried out into exactly what form these migratory movements from the eastern steppes took (e.g. Haak et al. 2015; Allentoft et al. 2015; Kaiser 2021). They are said to have been triggered in part by the rise of the first states in Mesopotamia and the associated establishment of a regime of power to which neighbouring societies were also subjected (Furholt 2021).

Since even older evidence of the plague has been found, dating to the end of the fourth millennium BC (Rascovan et al. 2019; Susat et al. 2021), the theory can be ruled out that migrants from the Eurasian steppes brought the plague to Central Europe in the third millennium BC (Trautmann 2021). The period at the end of the fourth and the start of the third millennium BC is thus a stage in the past that was characterised by an exceptionally high level of human mobility. Technological and cultural innovations, genes and indeed diseases accompanied the people on their travels.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Harald Stäuble of the Saxon Archaeological Heritage Office (LfA) for providing the carbon-14 data on the graves in Großstorkwitz, Greitschütz and Kölsa.