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A team of archaeologists sifted through scraps of DNA in the bones and teeth of Bronze Age cattle, goats, and sheep, as part of a large, ongoing study to track how these animals migrated, alongside humans, from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East across Eurasia. This is the first evidence of the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage of the bacteria found in a non-human animal, a discovery which the researchers shared in a preprint earlier this year. It's easy to imagine how domestic sheep, roaming across the vast grasslands of the Eurasian Steppe, may have encountered a wild animal carrying the bacteria, but not made sick by it, and then spread it between herds and shepherds. Nevertheless, it is not possible with a single genome to reconstruct a complete understanding of the ecology of the LNBA lineage across the diverse set of cultures and geographies afflicted by this prehistoric plague lineage, and our results suggest its reservoir remains at large," the authors conclude."