[Battle Axe]

Barbara Tuchman reported that the virulence of the Black Death declined as it moved North, and by the time it got to the Arctic the death rate was less than 10%.

Virulence as a measure of deaths, or deaths of infected persons?

[muawiyah]

Here's how much difference there was. Once the Black Death was more or less "over" tax authorities in Norway, which had been hit particularly hard, observed that the Sa'ami in the far North hadn't been subjected to the same death rate.

(Which means, death rate per population infected, or death rate of the population with cause unknown. Either definition works here.)

Consequently the tax authorities came up with a scheme of hiring Sa'ami to open up farms to the South where all the Norse people had died. They also had Sa'ami take over fishing boats, forests, etc.

The last farms made vacant by plague were opened up by Sa'ami settlers from the far North in the mid 1700s.

That was about 350 years worth of difference.

(Subtle nuances between different sorts of expressions of death rate are rather meaningless in this situation).

Roughly, the Sa'ami appear not to have been affected by the Black Death while the Norse were slaughtered like lambs in a Kosovan slaughter house the week before Ramadan.

Given that the Sa'ami have substantial and significant genetic differences from the Norse, and a myriad of epigenetic differences, you almost have to suspect the Sa'ami had a pre-existing genetic difference that protected them against Black Death whatever it might have been.

From the Sa'ami point of view the relocation back to the South was a mixed blessing. On the one hand the entire Sa'ami population was able to move firmly into the Iron age, but on the other they began to lose their distinct cultural identity (Little Red Man, Herb Woman, Reindeer Man), but not their genome ~ and it's only recently that it's been rediscovered.