Topic description and stories

‘Bone biographies’ reveal life and times of medieval England’s common people

01 Dec 2023

Researchers have given medieval Cambridge residents the ‘Richard III treatment’ to reveal the hard-knock lives of those who lived in the city during...

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Detail of the mosaic of Justinianus I in the Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy

Justinianic Plague was nothing like flu and may have hit England before Constantinople

22 Nov 2021

‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th–8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on...

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Left: Skull of a Yamnaya, the people who migrated to Central Asia in early Bronze Age and developed the Afanasievo culture. The Afanasievo are one of the Bronze Age groups carrying Y. pestis. Right: Scanning Electron Micrograph Of A Flea

Plague in humans ‘twice as old’ but didn’t begin as flea-borne, ancient DNA reveals

22 Oct 2015

New research dates plague back to the early Bronze Age, showing it had been endemic in humans across Eurasia for millennia prior to the first...

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Encoffining body, Changchun, 1911

Visions of plague

05 Dec 2014

A new research project is compiling the largest database of plague imagery ever amassed, focusing on a pandemic that peaked in the early 20th century...

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Dance of Death

2014 Darwin College Lecture Series focuses on plagues

09 Jan 2014

This year’s Darwin lecture series will see a wide range of distinguished speakers present lectures on plagues, with topics ranging from silicon...

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