Researchers believe they have solved the nearly 700-year-old mystery of the origins of the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in history, which swept across Europe, Asia and northern Africa in the mid-XNUMXth century, The Guardian wrote on Wednesday.
Tens of millions of people died when the bubonic plague broke out across continents, spreading along trade routes. Despite intensive efforts to discover the source of the explosion, the lack of hard evidence has left unanswered.
"We have found the origin in time and space, which is really remarkable," said Professor 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 most types of plague circulating in the world today."
The international team came together to work on the case when historian Philip Slavin discovered evidence of sudden deaths in 1330 at two cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan.
Among the 467 graves between 1248 and 1354, Slavin found a sudden increase in deaths. The inscriptions on some of the graves mentioned the cause of death as "mawtana", the ancient Syriac language that translates as "plague".
Analyzes of the remains showed that they had died from the bacterium Yersinia pestis that causes the plague.
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The oldest plague victim is identified
Analysis of the bacterium's genome revealed that it was an ancestor of the type of bacterium that caused the Black Death in Europe eight years later, which resulted in the death of over half of the continent's population.
