Human skeletons found during construction for a new underground rail line in London have made scientists question everything they thought they knew about the Black Death.
Researchers suspected the 25 skeletons, discovered last year under the Charterhouse Square, were victims of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, which wiped out millions of Europeans in the 14th century.
Scientists found traces of the plague in the skeletons. The plague, which traveled from central Asia to Europe, was once thought to have spread among humans from the bites of rats fleas. The plague arrived in 1348, and by the next year killed six out of 10 people, The Guardian reported. An estimated 25 million Europeans died from the Black Death.
According to scientists at Public Health England in Porton Down, for a disease to have spread that quickly, it would had to have been air borne, and not spread from rat fleas.
"As an explanation [rat fleas] for the Black Death in its own right, it simply isn't good enough," Tim Brooks, from PHE, told The Guardian. "It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics."
The person would have breathed the plague in through the lungs, making the plague pneumonic and not bubonic, The Guardian reported.
A lack of nutrition also accounted for how fast the disease was able to spread. The skeletons had traces of rickets, anemia and malnourished teeth. Those infected likely coughed and sneezed out the disease, thus infecting others who were already malnourished, scientists said.
Thanks to antibiotics, the plague can be prevented from spreading from human to human. But outbreaks of the disease still occur, including one last year in Madagascar that killed 60 people. The disease has not changed much over the centuries- the strain responsible for the Madagascar deaths is the same as the 14th century strain, scientists told The Guardian.
