The Black Death pandemic, which devastated a large portion of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages, emerged in Central Asia, now Kyrgyzstan, according to a study ending nearly seven centuries of inquiry.
Because of ancient human DNA, obtained from a 14th-century tomb in northern Kyrgyzstan, researchers have traced the origin. Their findings, published in the journal Naturearrange a very old debate with historians.
The Black Death epidemic reached Europe in 1346 via the Mediterranean basin, aboard ships carrying goods from the Black Sea. In just eight years, the black death kill up to 60% of the population of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. And marked the beginning of a long wave, which will reappear in 500 years.
Where was he born? One of the most common advanced leads is that in China, but no solid evidence has supported this theory.
I have always been fascinated with Black Death, and one of my dreams is to solve the mystery of its origins.said disaster historian Phil Slavin, one of the study’s authors, at a press conference.
This professor at the University of Stirling, Scotland, knew of the existence of two medieval burial sites near Lake Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan, which were excavated in the late 19th century.
Of the more than 400 tombstones, one hundred is precisely dated: 1338-1339. They carry an epitaph that mentions death from the plague, in Old Syriac. There were so many signs of abnormal mortality within a community, seven or eight years before the Black Death hit Europe.
To find the cause of death, the researchers searched the tooth DNA of seven skeletons. Dental pulp is an important resource, as it is a highly vascularized area that provides a high chance of detecting pathogens in the blood.explained to AFP Maria Spyrou, of the University of Tübingen in Germany, also author of the study.
DNA can be sequenced – a meticulous job as it is fragmented – then compared to a database containing the genomes of thousands of bacteria.
Verdict: the bodies are infected with bacteria Yersinia pestis, the bacillus responsible for the black plague, transmitted to humans by rodent fleas. This community thus fell victim to the plague that struck Europe a few years later.
Genome analyzes of Yersinia pestis also revealed that it is an ancestral strain of the bacterium, the one that is at the base of the genetic tree of the plague.
Scientists correctly associate the appearance of the Black Death in Europe with a Big Bang genetics in which stem bacteria are enormously diversified.
France Media Agency
Source: Radio-Canada
