Health experts may have found the origin of the Black Death Plague, a deadly pandemic that occurred roughly 700 years ago and lasted for almost five centuries, using DNA analysis.
The plague devastated the medieval world and has long been considered a mysterious outbreak whose source has been debated for centuries. But researchers said they had not pinpointed the source of the deadly pandemic in a region of Kyrgyzstan after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site.
Black Death Plague Origins
In the work published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the study, said that his team managed to put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death.
The deadly plague was the initial wave of a nearly five-century pandemic, and in only eight years, from 1346 to 1353, it caused the death of up to 60% of the population of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Slavin, an associate professor at the University of Stirling in Scotland, has always been fascinated with the Black Death, as per CBS News.
The expert found an intriguing clue in an 1890 work that described an ancient burial site in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan. It noted that there was a spike in burials from 1338 to 1339 and that several tombstones described people having "died of pestilence."
Slavin said that when there are one or two years of recorded excess in mortality, it commonly means that something unusual was going on at the time. However, he noted that it was not just any year but seven or eight years before the Black Death was first recorded.
According to The Guardian, Prof. Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig said that they have basically located the origin of the plague in time and space. He noted that they found not only the ancestry of the Black Death but also the ancestor of the majority of the plague strains that are circulating in the world today.
Analyzing Human Remains
The international team of experts came together to work on the puzzle and analyzed 467 tombstones dated between 1248 and 1345. Slavin traced a huge number of tombstones, 118, marking deaths between 1338 and 1339.
Further research led the team to discover that the sites had been excavated in the late 1880s with about 30 skeletons removed from their graves. After studying the diaries of the excavations, Slavin and his colleagues traced some of the remains and linked them to particular tombstones at the cemeteries.
The researchers were able to extract and sequence DNA from seven of the individuals using their teeth. In the genetic material the team analyzed, they found the DNA of the plague bacterium, which scientists call Yersinia pestis, in three of the deceased, who all had the death year 1338 inscribed on their tombstones.
The finding confirmed that the pestilence mentioned on the tombstones of the deceased was indeed the Black Death plague, which spread from rodents to humans via fleas. The plague first entered the Mediterranean in 1347 via trade ships transporting goods from territories around the Black Sea. It later spread across various countries, CNN reported.
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