The Black Death is considered the most devastating pandemic in history. For centuries, the origin of this disease was a mystery and a great topic of debate. However, a group of scientists has managed to decipher the truth.
This epidemic emerged at the end of the Middle Ages, in the fourteenth century, and took the lives of more than 50 million people in Asia Minor, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, which represented 60% of the population. of the Old Continent.
This information was documented by the historian of the time Ole J. Benedictow, in his book ‘The Black Plague’ (1346-1353). In addition, other authors justified that the pandemic had originated thanks to a “punishment from God”, as was the case of the chronicler Gabriele de Mussis.
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There were thousands of speculations that were made about it, but nobody managed to find a concise explanation. Meanwhile, the plague continued to spread through polluted air and water, leading to the deaths of more than half of the continent’s population.
What was its origin?
On Wednesday June 15, the specialized magazine ‘Nature’ published an article in which it revealed that The Black Death originated in northern present-day Kyrgyzstan, near the western border of China, in the late 1330s.
A group of archaeologists and geneticists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the universities of Tübingen, in Germany, and Stirling, in Scotland; They did this analysis using the bodies found in the necropolis of the towns of Kara-Djigach and Burana, in Kyrgyzstan.
Solved the mystery of the origins of the Black Death.
Researchers believe they have solved the nearly 700-year-old mystery of the origins of the Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in history, which swept across Europe, pic.twitter.com/P65xXEsnaX
— Brains (@CerebrosG) June 15, 2022
In a chronological study of these corpses, it was shown that between the years 1338 and 1339 there was an increase in deaths in the region, especially of people who came from a small province called Tian Shan.
The experts took 50 milligrams of enamel and dentin from the excavated human remains. In this analysis, the presence of a bacterium called Yersinia pestis was found, which had been shown to be from the plague.
Additionally, this bacterium was transmitted by rats and fleas. The rodents that currently live in that region of the Tien Shan are carriers of a strain of the bacteria very close to those of the human victims of 1338-1339.
“We have not only found the ancestor of the black death, but also that of the plague strains currently circulating around the world” added Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute.
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“Our study puts an end to one of the biggest and most famous questions in history and determines when and where the most notorious killer of humans infamously emerged,” said Phil Slavin, one of the paper’s authors.
The researchers determined that the Tian Shan region was inhabited by ethnic communities that established links with people from Europe and Asia due to trade activities.
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The inhabitants mobilized the products they sold by means of ships that arrived in ports of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. In this way, it was like the plague spread throughout the Old Continent.
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*With information from EFE.
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