DNA evidence from archaeological sites pinpoints central Asia as the birthplace of the Black Death. Click the link to read more.
rats and consumed the bacteria, which clogged the flea’s gut and prevented it from eating. The infected, starving fleas entered feeding frenzies, jumping from rat to rat, and left a trail of death and a population of infected fleas in its wake. Once the rat population dwindled, the fleas turned to humans, and the deadliest pandemic in recorded history began.But when and where did the plague leap from rodents to humans? That question has puzzled researchers for centuries.
To pinpoint a time and place for the origin of the Black Death, researchers turned to 14th century archaeological sites in central Asia. They identified two gravesites in Kyrgyzstan, where tombstones designated victims of the plague from 1338.
“We found the Black Death’s source strain and we even know its exact date,” says Maria Spyrou in a press release, lead author and researcher at the University of Tübingen. The ancient strain that the team identified closely resembles the strains that are found in modern-day marmots living near the archaeological site – a population of marmots that probablybetween plague outbreaks. The similarity between the gravesite and marmot genomes suggests that the victims contracted the bacterium when it had just leaped from rodents to humans.
“This points to an origin of Black Death’s ancestor in Central Asia,” concludes co-author Johannes Krause in a press release, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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