This approach proved that the bacterium Yersinia pestis was the cause of the fourteenth-to-seventeenth-century CE Black Death,14 the sixth-to-eighth-century CE Justinianic plague of the Roman Empire,15 and an endemic plague that was responsible for at least about 7 percent of deaths in skeletons from burials across the Eurasian steppe after around five thousand years ago.16
Black death identified in 3 different time periods
