Origin of Black Death plague that wiped out half of Europe 700 years ago traced back to Russia
THE BLACK Death killed around 60% of Europe's population in the 14th century and scientists now think they know where it started.
Researchers have pinpointed the earliest evidence of the deadly illness to a placed called Laishevo in Russia.
Millions of people perished in the early wave of the Black Death but the bacterium responsible for the disease was never actually contained.
The bacteria which caused the plague is called Yersinia pestis and it continued to wipe out humans for another 500 years after the mid-14th century outbreak.
An international team of researchers used the teeth of 24 individuals who died from the second plague pandemic in 10 different countries to reconstruct Yersinia pestis genomes.
These genomes allowed them to create something similar to a genetic family tree which spanned from the 14th to the 17th century.
The family tree highlighted a common staring point for the bacteria samples that were taken from England, France, Germany and other regions across Europe.
This suggests that there was one ancestor for all the second plague pandemic strains.
Archaeogeneticist Maria Spyrou from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History said: "These findings indicate a single entry of Y. pestis into Europe through the east."
The ancestral bacteria is thought to come from a town called Laishevo in Russia, based on an ancient evidence sample called LAI009.
The researchers explained in : "Our phylogenetic reconstruction shows that the LAI009 isolate from Laishevo is ancestral to the Black Death isolates from southern, central, western and northern Europe, as well as to the previously published late 14th-century isolates from London and Bolgar City.
"We interpret LAI009 as the most ancestral form of the strain that entered Europe during the initial wave of the second pandemic that has been identified to date."
It was previously thought that the Black Death originated in Central Asia and was carried to Europe by fleas living on black rats that travelled on all merchant ships.
However, this theory could still be correct as scientists have not yet sampled ancient Yersinia pestis DNA from Asia and so could still find even older evidence of the bacteria.
Spyrou : "It is possible that additional interpretations may be revealed with future discoveries of unsampled diversity in western Eurasia."
The researchers cannot be certain that they have found the definitive origin of the Black Death but their work does help to illustrate some of the earliest known origins of the second plague pandemic.
They concluded in their paper: "The second plague pandemic has arguably caused the highest levels of mortality of the three recorded plague pandemics.
"It serves as a classic historical example of rapid infectious disease emergence, long-term local persistence and eventual extinction for reasons that are currently not understood."
These findings have been published in the journal .
A brief history of the plague
Here are the key facts...
- Plague has a remarkable place in history and has had enormous effects on the development of modern civilisation.
- Some scholars have even suggested that the collapse of the Roman Empire may be linked to the spread of plague by Roman soldiers returning home from battle in the Persian Gulf in 165 AD.
- For centuries, plague represented disaster for people living in Asia, Africa and Europe and because the cause of plague was unknown, plague outbreaks contributed to massive panic in cities and countries where it appeared.
- Numerous references in art, literature and monuments attest to the horrors and devastation of past plague epidemics.
- We now know that plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis that often infects small rodents (like rats, mice, and squirrels) and is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected flea.
- In the past, black rats were the most commonly infected animals and hungry rat fleas would jump from their recently-dead rat hosts to humans, looking for a blood meal.
- Pneumonic plague, a particular form of plague infection, is instead transmitted through infected droplets in a sick person’s cough.
- Together, the Pneumonic and Bubonic plague (black death) killed an estimated 200 million people in the 14th Century
(Source: US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention)
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