Tooth from JerashUniversity of South Florida
Posted on 09/08/2025 7:14:56 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The world's first pandemic, known as the Plague of Justinian after the sitting Byzantine emperor, killed an estimated 25 to 100 million people between a.d. 541 and 750... historical sources from the period suggest that it may have begun around Pelusium, Egypt, before spreading rapidly throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. According to a statement released by the University of South Florida (USF), researchers participated in an interdisciplinary study that has uncovered -- for the first time -- direct genomic evidence pinpointing the bacterium Yersinia pestis as the cause of the plague. The team sequenced genetic material from eight human teeth taken from individuals buried in a mid-sixth to early seventh-century a.d. mass grave beneath the former Roman hippodrome in Jerash, Jordan, a city just 200 miles from ancient Pelusium. The study determined that the plague victims carried nearly identical strains of Y. pestis, confirming for the first time that the microbe was present within the Byzantine Empire between a.d. 550 and 660. "For centuries, we've relied on written accounts describing a devastating disease, but lacked any hard biological evidence of plague's presence," said USF researcher Rays H.Y. Jiang. "Our findings provide the missing piece of that puzzle, offering the first direct genetic window into how this pandemic unfolded at the heart of the empire." Yersinia pestis was also responsible for causing the infamous Black Death, which may have wiped out as much as 50 percent of Europe's population in the fourteenth century. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Genes. To read about evidence of a virulent form of the bacterium that circulated as early as 1800 b.c., go to "Bronze Age PlagueBronze Age Plague," one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of 2018.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
Tooth from JerashUniversity of South Florida
“Yersinia pestis was also responsible for causing the infamous Black Death”
This is in error - should read: “Yersinia pestis was also responsible for causing Democrats”
Related
800-year-old graves pinpoint where the Black Death began Ancient DNA from cemeteries in today’s Kyrgyzstan reveal earliest known victims of 14th century plague.
The Syriac engraving on the medieval tombstone was tantalizing: “This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. [He] died of pestilence.” Sanmaq, who was buried in 1338 near Lake Issyk Kul in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan, was one of many victims of the unnamed plague. By scrutinizing field notes and more photos from the Russian team that had excavated the graves in the 1880s, historian Philip Slavin found that at least 118 people from Sanmaq’s Central Asian trading community died in the epidemic.
https://www.science.org/content/article/800-year-old-graves-pinpoint-where-black-death-began
The name Yersinia Pestis name is probably registered as a Democrat in every precinct in the US.
Wikipedia says something interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
Earlier samples of Yersinia pestis DNA have been found in skeletons dating from 3000 to 800 BC, across West and East Eurasia.[43] The strain of Yersinia pestis responsible for the Black Death, the devastating pandemic of bubonic plague, does not appear to be a direct descendant of the Justinian plague strain. However, the spread of Justinian plague may have caused the evolutionary radiation that gave rise to the currently extant 0ANT.1 clade of strains.
Best book about the plague;
A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
Author Barbara Tuchman, circa 1978 or 1979.
Extremely well researched, she also wrote The Guns of August, circa 1961, about the origins of World War One.
Thx!
Plague of Justinian and Justinian Plague keywords, sorted:
They buried the lede. The disease vector originated in China.
It was more than just that they found the earliest known, the virus itself was a parent form that hadn’t mutated, pristine. So it’s pretty much a smoking gun that those Kygrsystanfijdfls were the first effected. I guess since it ended up hittting everyone else eventually anyway they got off easy dying before before all the economic and social disasters hit.
FYI...
Yersinia pestis is a bacterium...not a virus.
Freegards.
Microbes have much shorter generations, which must make it more difficult to determine a parsimonious descent tree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis
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Y. pestis is a facultative anaerobic parasitic bacterium that can infect humans primarily via its host the Oriental rat flea
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The Holy Roman empire was composed of grain farming communes. As with all grain farming communes HRE had rats in abundance.
Is there a cure for it?
Of course it is. Sloppy language on my part. thanks for correction.
Occasional recent diagnoses in the US have been related to dogs and cats kept as pets, same wheelhouse.
I have those, uh, around here somewhere. I got the audiobook of Distant Mirror out of the library years ago and got bogged down in the description of the 100 years war warriors and their history. Probably should have bounced into some later chapter disks. Or, just ripped it into MP3 for later.
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