Mystery of Black Death's Origins Solved, Say Researchers
- The Guardian, June 15, 2022. Ed. - International team link spike in deaths at cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan in 1300s to start of plague pandemic. -
Researchers believe they have solved the nearly 700-year-old mystery of the origins of the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in recorded history, which swept through Europe, Asia and north Africa in the mid-14th century. At least tens of millions of people died when bubonic plague tore across the continents, probably by spreading along trade routes. Despite intense efforts to uncover the source of the outbreak, the lack of firm evidence has left the question open.
“We have basically located the origin in time and space, which is really remarkable,” said Prof Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “We found not only the ancestor of the Black Death, but the ancestor of the majority of the plague strains that are circulating in the world today.”
The international team came together to work on the puzzle when Dr Philip Slavin, a historian at the University of Stirling, discovered evidence for a sudden surge in deaths in the late 1330s at two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in the north of modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Among 467 tombstones dated between 1248 and 1345, Slavin traced a huge increase in deaths, with 118 stones dated 1338 or 1339. Inscriptions on some of the tombstones mentioned the cause of death as “mawtānā”, the Syriac language term for “pestilence”. Further research revealed 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 investigation then passed over to specialists on ancient DNA, including Krause and Dr Maria Spyrou at the University of Tübingen in Germany. They extracted genetic material from the teeth of 7 individuals who were buried at the cemeteries. Three of them contained DNA from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. Full analysis of the bacterium’s genome found that it was a direct ancestor of the strain that caused the Black Death in Europe 8 years later and, as a result, was probably the cause of death for more than half the population on the continent in the next decade or so...
- More, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/15/mystery-black-death-origins-solved-plague-pandemic
= new reply since forum marked as read
The original excavations of cemeteries in North Kyrgyzstan took place in 1886
Photograph from the original excavations in 1886
An engraved tombstone of person who died from the Black Death plague from the Kara-Djigach cemetery in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Credit: P.-G. Borbone, M. A. Spyrou et al./Nature
- Nature: 'Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death,' June 15, 2022, Ed.
- Genomes show that plague-causing bacteria found in Kyrgyzstan graves are direct ancestors of those that triggered the medieval pandemic. -
A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a 14th c. outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who co-led the study, published on 15 June in Nature.
Between 1346 -1353, the Black Death laid waste to western Eurasia, killing up to 60% of the populace in some places.
Historical records suggest that the bubonic plague emerged from the east: Caffa, on the Crimean peninsula, experienced one of the earliest-recorded outbreaks of plague during a 1346 siege by the army of the Mongol Empire. The Caucasus and other locales in Central Asia have been put forward as potential epicentres. China hosts some of the world’s greatest genetic diversity of modern Y. pestis strains, hinting at an East Asian origin for the Black Death. “There were all kinds of hypotheses in the literature. And it was not really known where it exactly came from,” says Krause. - Signs of the plague: Several years ago, Philip Slavin, an economic and environmental historian at the University of Stirling, UK, and a co-lead author of the study, came across records from a pair of 14th c. cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan that, he thought, might hold clues to the origins of the Black Death.
The cemeteries, known as Kara-Djigach and Burana, held an unusually high number of tombstones dated to 1338 and 1339, 10 of which made explicit reference to a pestilence. “When you have one or two years with excess mortality, it means something funny is going on there,” Slavin said. To determine whether the burials held any relevance to the later Black Death, Slavin worked with Krause to track down the remains from the Kyrgyz cemetery- which had been excavated in the 1880s and 1890s and moved to St Petersburg, Russia. The team, led by archaeogeneticist Maria Spyrou at the University of Tübingen, Germany, sequenced ancient DNA from 7 people whose remains were recovered, discovering Y. pestis DNA in 3 burials from Kara-Djigach.
A pair of full Y. pestis genomes gleaned from the data showed that the bacteria were direct ancestors of strains linked to the Black Death, including a Y. pestis sample from a person who died in London that Krause’s team sequenced in 2011.
The Kara-Djigach strain was also an ancestor of the vast majority of Y. pestis lineages around today- a sign of an explosion in Y. pestis diversity shortly before the Black Death. “It was like a big bang of plague,” Krause said.
Other evidence puts the origins of the Black Death in this part of Central Asia. In modern strains of Y. pestis bacteria, those sampled from marmots & other rodents in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan & Xinjiang in NW China, surrounding the Tian Shan mountain range, were most closely related to the Kara-Djigach strain. “We can’t really say it’s that village or that valley, but it’s likely that region,” he says. Rodents are the natural reservoir for Y. pestis, & humans develop bubonic plague only when a vector such as a flea passes on the infection. Krause suspects that humans’ close contact with infected marmots sparked the Kyrgyzstan epidemic, whereas immunologically naive rat populations in Europe fuelled the Black Death. Tian Shan makes sense as an epicentre for the Black Death. The region is on the ancient Silk Road trade route, & the graves were found to contain pearls from the Indian Ocean,.....
- More, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01673-4
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- Tarbagan marmot, rodent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbagan_marmot
- The Tarbagan marmot is a species of rodent in the family Sciuridae. It is found in China (Inner Mongolia & Heilongjiang), northern & western Mongolia, & Russia (SW Siberia, Tuva, Transbaikalia). - As a game animal: The tarbagan marmot has been eaten for centuries in the native cuisine of Mongolia, & in particular in a local dish called boodog. The meat is cooked by inserting hot stones, preheated in a fire, into the abdominal cavity of a deboned marmot. The skin is then tied up to make a bag within which the meat cooks. Hunting of marmots for food is typically done in autumn when the animals are heavier since they are preparing for hibernation..
- As a disease carrier: Epizootics of the plague occur in tarbagan marmots in NE China & Mongolia, such as the Manchurian plague of 1910–1911. The plague in marmots is of the pneumonic form, spread by marmots coughing. The plague can jump from marmots to humans through the bite of the tarbagan flea, or through consumption of meat. Marmot epizootics are known to co-occur with human epidemics in the same area. Human plague epidemics in this area are largely pneumonic plague, the most deadly form of plague. In 2019, a Mongolian couple died of plague after eating raw marmot meat...
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* ALSO: 'Teenage boy dies of bubonic plague in Mongolia after eating marmot,' The Guardian, July 15, 2020. Two others being treated with antibiotics after death of 15-year-old, health ministry says.
A 15-year-old boy has died of bubonic plague in western Mongolia after eating an infected marmot, the country’s health ministry has said. Two other teenagers who also ate the marmot were being treated with antibiotics, said a ministry spokesperson, Narangerel Dorj. The government imposed a quarantine on an area of Gobi-Altai province, where the cases occurred. The health ministry said 15 people who had contact with the boy were quarantined and receiving antibiotics. Plague is found in marmots, large rodents that live in burrows in the sprawling north Asian grassland, and some other wild animals in parts of Mongolia, north-western China and eastern Russia...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/teenage-boy-dies-plague-mongolia-after-eating-marmot
- 'Coronavirus: What can the 'plague village' of Eyam teach us?' BBC News, 22 April *2020
With coronavirus putting households around the world in lockdown, can the English "plague village" of Eyam, which quarantined itself for more than a year, offer us lessons on how to fight back? As a nightmare tale from history, Eyam's ordeal takes some surpassing. When plague arrived in September 1665, rather than flee this wild corner of Derbyshire - and risk spreading the infection - villagers locked themselves away to suffer in isolation. And suffer they did... https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-51904810
- Eyam village green and church.
- Wiki. 1665 plague outbreak. (Main article: Great Plague of London). The history of the plague in the village began in 1665 when a flea-infested bundle of cloth arrived from London for Alexander Hadfield, the local tailor.[14] Within a week his assistant George Viccars, noticing the bundle was damp, had opened it up. Before long he was dead and more began dying in the household soon after. As the disease spread, the villagers turned for leadership to their rector, the Reverend William Mompesson, and the ejected Puritan minister Thomas Stanley. They introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness from May 1666. The measures included the arrangement that families were to bury their own dead and relocation of church services to the natural amphitheatre of Cucklett Delph, allowing villagers to separate themselves and so reducing the risk of infection.
Perhaps the best-known decision was to quarantine the entire village to prevent further spread of the disease. Merchants from surrounding villages sent supplies that they would leave on marked rocks; the villagers then made holes there which they would fill with vinegar to disinfect the money left as payment. The plague ran its course over 14 months and one account states that it killed at least 260 villagers, with only 83 surviving out of a population of 350. That figure has been challenged, with alternative figures of 430 survivors from a population of around 800 being given. The church in Eyam has a record of 273 individuals who were victims of the plague. Survival among those affected appeared random, as many who remained alive had close contact with those who died but never caught the disease. For example, Elizabeth Hancock was uninfected despite burying six children and her husband in eight days. The graves are known as the Riley graves after the farm where they lived. The unofficial village gravedigger, Marshall Howe, also survived, despite handling many infected bodies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyam