Black Death origin mystery solved after 675 years, researchers say

CBS ^ | JUNE 15, 2022 / 11:52 AM | Staff

[Red Badger]

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.

Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death https://t.co/NNd656FmhG

— nature (@Nature) June 15, 2022

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.

For that, Slavin teamed up with specialists who examine ancient DNA.

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.

The Excavation Of The Black Death Cemetery At The Royal Mint Site

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.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

The Black Plague?? Isn’t that racist?

[SES1066]

YET no mention about the “Plague of Justinian” (541-49) that is also attributed to Yersinia pestis with the same rough origin geography but a 20% fatality rate in the cities. Due to the diminished travel in western Europe, its main effects were Byzantine / Eastern Roman Empire, the Sasanian Empire (Persia) and the Mediterranean trading routes that led to both northern Europe and south into Arabia.

A historical cusp deriving from this is the explosion of conquering Islam in the next century out of interior Arabia. With both Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia weak from this plague and centuries of incessant wars, neither was strong enough to resist that tide. By 651, Persia was fully conquered and, in that same century, Byzantium lost almost everything south of Anatolia to all of North Africa.

[Paal Gulli]

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

So the mystery isn't all that solved, is it?

[nicollo]

Everyone knows it was bats. Or pangolins.

(whatever those are)

[Red Badger]

Only in the USA...................

[Red Badger]

Armored anteaters.....................

[Red Badger]

https://search.brave.com/images?q=pangolins

[SunkenCiv]

Related topics from the YP keyword below.

• Long list: How the black rat colonized Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods [05/07/2022]

  ---

• A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis (Yersinia pestis is discovered in a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer from Latvia) [06/30/2021]
• How did the plague reshape Bronze Age Europe? [05/20/2020]
• Origins Of The Black Death Traced Back To China, Gene Sequencing Has Revealed; A Plague That Killed Over a Third of Europe's Population [02/27/2020]
• Plague in humans 'twice as old' but didn't begin as flea-borne, ancient DNA reveals [07/28/2019]
• Did a new form of plague destroy Europe's Stone Age societies? [06/13/2019]
• Oldest Bubonic Plague Genome Decoded [06/11/2018]
• Black Death may have been lurking for centuries: DNA of plague victims in France backs up theory... [01/23/2016]
• In Ancient DNA, Evidence of Plague Much Earlier Than Previously Known [11/06/2015]
• Plague Infected Humans Much Earlier Than Previously Thought [10/24/2015]
• Is Ebola the Same Virus as the Black Death? Historical Similarities are Striking [10/14/2014]
• Study of ancient and modern plagues finds common features [11/21/2008]
• Plague Victims Discovered After 1500 Years (Justinian) [04/10/2008]
• Bubonic Plague Traced To Ancient Egypt (Black Death) [03/11/2004]

[SunkenCiv]

[I set the time index to skip the intro] James Howard-Johnston (University of Oxford)- The Last Great War of Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2021). 1st Online Edinburgh Byzantine Book Festival, 5-7 February, 2021. Chaired by: Yannis Stouraitis, University of Edinburgh. Organised by: Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, University of Edinburgh.

James Howard-Johnston - The Last Great War of Antiquity
February 17, 2021 | Online Edinburgh Byzantine Book Festival

[SES1066]

Interesting and, pardon me for smiling, but for the news of the demise of the last outlet of the Howard Johnson chain to coincide with this erudite professor that bears such a similar family name, ...

Thanks for the posting!

[colorado tanker]

My concern is the next cool period may usher in the Big One, the descent into the next Ice Age. Glad I won’t live to see it.

[Tell It Right]

I agree. The trend is each cool period is worse than the prior. The next one will probably be cooler than the frigid cold that Hillary is to Bill.

[colorado tanker]

That’s colder than a witch’s . . . wait a minute, Hillary is a witch!

[SunkenCiv]

There’s a reporter who covers astronomy news that has an amusingly apropos name, Michelle Starr.

[SunkenCiv]

[snip] In 1338 or 1339 “Bačaq, a faithful woman” in her 40s who stood just four feet, eight inches, died and was buried in the Kara-Djigach cemetery, about seven miles outside Bishkek, the capital of what is now Kyrgyzstan. Her tombstone was inscribed in Syriac, an Aramaic dialect. She was one of 114 people buried there during those two years—who accounted for one quarter of all the cemetery’s burials while it was in operation from 1245 to 1345. Bačaq’s tombstone does not mention a cause of death, but other 1338–1339 tombstones do: mawtānā, or pestilence. Today it is called plague. [/snip]

Ancient Women’s Teeth Reveal Origins of 14th-Century Black Death
A medieval cemetery yields DNA evidence of the deadly pandemic bacterium’s Central Asian ancestor
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-women-rsquo-s-teeth-reveal-origins-of-14-century-black-death/

[wildbill]

You might also read Tales from the Decameron written in 1351. It is the story of 10 “elites” of the day practicing social distancing by isolating themselves in a villa during the 1348 plague in Italy.

They pass the time telling each other short stories about life , love, and the plague. I believe it is the only work of art about the Black Death that was written contemporaneously. I was a voracious reader at 10-12 and somehow came across it in a libaray.