To try to solve the puzzle of how the infection persisted and spread over thousands of years in Eurasia, an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Infection Biology, Harvard University, the University of Arkansas, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, and Seoul National University investigated the bones and teeth of Bronze Age livestock at the pastoralist site Arkaim (Russia), a Eurasian Steppe site belonging to the Sintashta-Petrovka culture known for its innovations in cattle, sheep, and horse husbandry. There they identified a 4,000-year-old sheep infected with the same LNBA lineage of Y. pestis that was infecting people at the time.
1985 Army vaccine recipient here.
I remember not a vaccine, but a battery, multiple shots in each arm. I, too, only got sore arms, but some guys looked pretty ill.
I have no idea what was in þose cocktails, but when I traveled to India for work later and had an antibody test for vaccine boosters, after reading þe test þe clinician asked if I was ex-military.
I still had to get boosters for þings I’m sure were in þe original, like yellow fever and malaria, so I figured þey don’t stay effective þat long.