Black Death origin mystery solved after 675 years, researchers say

A deadly pandemic with mysterious origins: It might sound like a modern headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the source of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world.

Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site.

"We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Black Death was the initial wave of a nearly 500-year pandemic. In just eight years, from 1346 to 1353, it killed up to 60% of the population of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to estimates.

Slavin, an associate professor at the University of Stirling in Scotland who has "always been fascinated with the Black Death," found an intriguing clue in an 1890 work describing an ancient burial site in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan.

It reported a spike in burials in 1338-39 and that several tombstones described people having "died of pestilence."

"When you have one or two years with excess mortality it means that something funny was going on there," Slavin told reporters.

"But it wasn't just any year — 1338 and 1339 was just seven or eight years before the Black Death," he said.

It was a lead, but nothing more without determining what killed the people at the site.

They extracted DNA from the teeth of seven people buried at the site, explained Maria Spyrou, a researcher at the University of Tuebingen and author of the study.

Because teeth contain many blood vessels, they give researchers "high chances of detecting blood-borne pathogens that may have caused the deaths of the individuals," Spyrou told AFP.

Once extracted and sequenced, the DNA was compared against a database of thousands of microbial genomes.

"One of the hits that we were able to get... was a hit for Yersinia pestis," more commonly known as plague, said Spyrou.

The DNA also displayed "characteristic damage patterns," she added, showing that "what we were dealing with was an infection that the ancient individual carried at the time of their death."

The start of the Black Death has been linked to a so-called "Big Bang" event, when existing strains of the plague, which is carried by fleas on rodents, suddenly diversified.

Scientists thought it might have happened as early as the 10th century but had not been able to pinpoint a date.

The research team painstakingly reconstructed the Y. pestis genome from their samples and found the strain at the burial site pre-dated the diversification.

And rodents living in the region now were also found to be carrying the same ancient strain, helping the team conclude the "Big Bang" must have happened somewhere in the area in a short window before the Black Death.

A 2009 file photo of the Black Death burial trench under excavation between the concrete foundations of the Royal Mint, East Smithfield, London. GETTY IMAGES The research has some unavoidable limitations, including a small sample size, according to Michael Knapp, an associate professor at New Zealand's University of Otago who was not involved in the study.

"Data from far more individuals, times and regions... would really help clarify what the data presented here really means," said Knapp.

But he acknowledged it could be difficult to find additional samples, and praised the research as nonetheless "really valuable."

Sally Wasef, a paleogeneticist at Queensland University of Technology, said the work offered hope for untangling other ancient scientific mysteries.

"The study has shown how robust microbial ancient DNA recovery could help reveal evidence to solve long-lasting debates," she told AFP.

According to the World Health Organization, a total of 3,248 cases were reported worldwide between 2010 and 2015, resulting in 584 deaths. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Peru were the most affected countries.

The plague was first introduced to the U.S. in 1900 from steamships carrying infected rats. The last urban outbreak of rat-associated plague in the U.S. was in Los Angeles between 1924 and 1925.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people typically get bubonic or septicemic plague after they are bitten by a flea that is carrying the bacterium. Humans may also contract the disease when handling an animal that is infected.

Take a gander at the weather patterns since the Holocene Epoch around 5,500 BC (in the graph that'd be 7.5 thousand years ago). On average the temps have slowly gone down for the past almost 8 thousand years. This is because we're on the last half of the Holocene Glacial Period. The black line has a "mountain top" every thousand or so years. These are the mini-glacial periods. If you'll notice the tops are trending lower, the same for the bottoms.

Now look at the Little Ice Age up close. Do you see around year AD 1500 there was a brief reprieve rise in temps that lasted about 50 years? People living in that time thought their cooling period was over. People then weren't stupid about climate science like the political class is today. When their temps were warming they thought their two-century long cooling period was coming to an end and they'd go back to a climate that's easier to survive in. But the climate yelled "Psyche!" and got much cooler until the 1800's. People were literally freezing to death in August in modern day Germany. In the UK during the winters the Thames River would freeze over and they'd have festivals on it. If you think about American history and how many of the colonists starved to death, especially during the winters, now you know why. Now you know one of the reasons why many of the indigenous tribes in America fought each so brutally and took over each other's crop land in search for more crop yield. Now you know why many African leaders brutally took over each other's land to get crop land to feed their starving people. What did they do with the people in other lands they captured while stealing their land? They sold them as slaves. (Now you know the main basis for the supply side of the African slave trade.) Have you heard that a large portion of slaves died during the transit. What the worldly left wants you to forget are: 1) most of the slaves died during transit before reaching the shores (they died in Africa), and 2) people were dying all over Africa, Asia, and Europe anyway whether they were slave or free.

By the way, it's for the same reason during the Dark Age (though not nearly as intense as the Little Ice Age) that the Huns took over land southwest of them in search for more crop yield. That displaced a lot of Germanic people, which forced the Germanic people to go into what was left of the western Roman Empire (the fall of Rome) and keep going southwest into modern day Germany. Which is where the Anglos and Saxons lived, so they were displaced and forced north (ouch! when it's hard enough to survive during the LIA the last thing you want is to be forced north). This was during the AD 4th century (300's to those of you in Rio Linda). By the end of the century a lot of Huns had moved into Scandinavia and displaced the Anglos and Saxons again (forcing them to move west into Britannia).

Basically, if you're majority Anglo you're the descendent of a group that was displaced twice (reparations due?). And for mainly the same reason the Anglos displaced the indigenous Americans over a thousand years later --- everybody was doing desperate things to survive in desperate times of global cooling.

Last soapbox (LOL): Think about the fact that the godless left that obsesses over global warming is the same godless left that wants us to feel guilty over the "atrocities" of the past. They're basically contradicting themselves. Most of the atrocities they pretend to be obsessed with happen during the worst cooling period in the past 10,000 years. In the Modern Warm Period (since the late 1800's, some say close to AD 1900) the Hitlers and Stalins are rare occurrences, not the norm. In the cooling periods virtually all nations, kingdoms, races are brutal in their strive to survive and virtually all of them have been the victim of others striving to survive.

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