Buried among 77 other people from her village in western Sweden are the bones of a 20 year-old woman. Now an analysis of DNA extracted from her teeth reveals what likely killed her. An international team of researchers has discovered the woman, who died some 5,000 years ago, had the oldest known case of the plague.

The finding suggests the world’s first plague epidemic took out her community and vast swaths of the Neolithic farming population in Europe. If confirmed, the notorious pathoge