<img src=”https://naked-science.ru/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ypmap.jpg” alt=”Sheep became a reservoir for the spread of plague in the Bronze Age”/>The transition to agriculture brought people not only opportunities for development, but also new diseases. Scientists believe that the domestication of animals was accompanied by the emergence of microbes that cause deadly infections – tuberculosis, salmonellosis, measles, plague. However, there is not enough data that would allow localizing the source of pathogens. The authors of a new scientific paper discovered the genome of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in the remains of a domesticated sheep from the late Neolithic. This will help to reconstruct the history of the introduction of infection from a natural reservoir to the human population.