An ancient disease that wiped out 50 million people was discovered in the DNA of an Egyptian mummy.

A team of archaeologists took samples from an ancient Egyptian mummy belonging to the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, to see whether there were any prominent discoveries they could find.

Both bone tissue and intestinal content were taken from the male corpse and it was quickly discovered that it contained remnants of the Black Death within it.

The pandemic began in 1347 and was thought to have arrived on European shores via trading ships docking at ports such as Messina in Sicily.

Samples of the Black plague were found in a mummy in Italy. Credit: Stefano Guidi/Getty

At the time, witness accounts recalled sailors aboard the vessels were gravely ill, covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus – a symptom now synonymous with this plague.

Within days, the disease spread to thousands of people across multiple towns, killing as many as 25-30 million people – which is approximately one-third of Europe’s population – within the four years it was around.

But what caused the illness in the first place?

Well, researchers concluded that the plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium carried by fleas on black rats.

However, the disease’s rapid spread was exacerbated by poor sanitation, dense populations, and the vast number of trade routes that helped move it around.

The illness manifested in three forms: bubonic (the most common), septicemic, and pneumonic – each more deadly than the former.

Painting shows a scene of people suffering from the bubonic plague in the 15th century from the Toggenberg Bible. Credit: Bettmann / Contributor/Getty

Victims often died within days of infection, so they were shocked to see samples consisting of the disease even years after it was considered over in Europe.

It is also the first discovery of the disease outside of medieval Europe and Asia, as per the Mirror.

Speaking of the discovery at the European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association, the team said: “Here, we report the presence of Y. pestis DNA in an ancient Egyptian mummy of an adult male from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy.”

They continued: “The individual, who was anthropogenically mummified, was radiocarbon-dated from the end of the Second Intermediate Period to the beginning of the New Kingdom, yet its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown.

“Bone tissue and intestinal content derived from the mummy were first subjected to a shotgun metagenomics approach. Thereby, we detected Y. pestis DNA in both samples indicating broad tissue tropism of the pathogen during an already advanced state of disease progression,” the researchers noted.

“This is the first reported prehistoric Y. pestis genome outside Eurasia providing molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt, although we cannot infer how widespread the disease was during this time,” they concluded.

While the disease may be considered one of the past, it has not been completely eradicated.

In February 2024, a man in Oregon in the United States caught the bubonic plague from his pet cat. The following month, health officials in Lincoln County, New Mexico, announced a man had died of the disease.

“There still are little pockets of plague in the US,” evolutionary geneticist Paul Norman said, per BBC Future.

He also added that it still circulates in wild animals such as squirrels and prairie dogs, though it can be treated more easily in humans with antibiotics.