DNA Confirms Cause of 1665 London's Great Plague (bbc.com)

Slashdot reader JThaddeus writes: The BBC reports that a 17th-century mass grave uncovered in London confirms the identity of the bacteria responsible for the Great Plague of 1665-1666. "Testing in Germany confirmed the presence of DNA from the Yersinia pestis bacterium -- the agent that causes bubonic plague -- rather than another pathogen." The grave contains approximately 3,500 skeletons... Teeth were removed from some of the skulls, and their pulp tested at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Positive results were found in 5 of 20 individuals tested.
"To reassure anyone worried whether plague bacterium was released from the excavation work or scientific analysis, it doesn't survive in the ground," reports the BBC. The 3,500 graves represent roughly 3.5% of London's 100,000 victims of the Great Plague -- one-quarter of the city's entire population.

Comments

Re:At what point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "rule of thumb" in the UK at least is that you own your plot for 70 years after which it's fair game, although the habbit of being buryed with or next to your spouse and / or children presumably resets the clock.

The historic practice was that when the graveyard got full the oldest plots would be dug up and the bones would be placed in the ossuary (typically a small stone "tomb" you still see in some old graveyards) When the ossuary was full the bones would be removed and burnt on a "Bone Pyre" which is the origin of the word Bonfire. A lot of small village churches have tiny graveyards, with room for only a 2 dozen plots if that, still I'd imagine the Bury-Exhume-Inter-Burn cycle probably took over a century and it's unlikely that anybody particularly cared about who was getting cremated at that point.