The Black Death was the beginning of a pandemic that lasted nearly 500 years. (Represent)
Tokyo:
A deadly pandemic with a mysterious origin: it sounds like a modern-day headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the origins of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world .
Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the origin of the plague to an area of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site.
“We’ve tried to really put down all the centuries-old controversies about the origin of the world,” said Philip Slavin, a historian and a member of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. of the Black Death.
The Black Death was the beginning of a pandemic that lasted nearly 500 years. It is estimated that in just 8 years, from 1346 to 1353, it killed 60% of the population of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Slavin, an associate professor at the University of Stirling in Scotland who has always been “fascinated by the Black Death”, found intriguing clues in an 1890 work depicting an ancient burial site in northern Kyrgyzstan dated to the present day. now.
It reports a spike in burials in 1338-39 and some tombstones depicting people who “died of the plague”.
“When you have a year or two with a high mortality rate, it means something funny happened there,” Slavin told reporters.
“But it wasn’t just which year – 1338 and 1339 were just seven or eight years before the Black Death.”
It was a lead, but nothing more without identifying what killed people at the location.
So Slavin teamed up with experts to examine ancient DNA.
Maria Spyrou, a researcher at the University of Tuebingen and the study’s author, explained that they extracted DNA from the teeth of seven people buried at the site.
Because teeth contain many blood vessels, they give researchers “a high chance of detecting blood-borne pathogens that may have caused the deaths of individuals,” Spyrou told AFP.
‘Big Bang’ Event
After being extracted and sequenced, the DNA is compared with databases of thousands of microbial genomes.
Spyrou said: “One of the hits we were able to get… was the hit by Yersinia pestis.
The DNA also displays “characteristic patterns of damage,” she added, suggesting that “what we’re dealing with is an infection that the ancient individual carried at the time of their death.”
The onset of the Black Death was related to an event known as the “Big Bang”, when existing strains of plague, carried by fleas on rodents, suddenly diversified.
Scientists think it may have happened as early as the 10th century, but the date has yet to be determined.
The team carefully reconstructed the genome of Y. pestis from their samples and found the strain at the burial site prior to diversification.
And rodents living in the area today have also been found to carry an ancient lineage, leading the team to conclude that the “Big Bang” must have happened somewhere in the area a short time ago. Black death.
According to Michael Knapp, an associate professor at New Zealand’s University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, the study has some unavoidable limitations, including its small sample size.
“Data from many different individuals, times and regions … will really help clarify what the data presented here really means,” Knapp said.
However, he admits it can be difficult to find additional samples and hails the study as “really valuable”.
Sally Wasef, a paleontologist at the Queensland University of Technology, says the work offers hope for unraveling other ancient scientific mysteries.
“Research has shown how powerful the ability of microorganisms to recover ancient DNA can help reveal evidence that resolves long-standing debates,” she told AFP.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from the syndication feed.)
