Scientists examining the remains of 36 bubonic plague victims from a 16th-century mass grave found evidence that evolutionary adaptive processes—driven by the organism—may have conferred immunity on later generations of people (Mol Biol Evol 2021 May 18. doi:10.1093/molbev/msab147).
“We found that innate immune markers increased in frequency in modern people from the town compared with plague victims,” said Paul Norman, PhD, an associate professor at