Black Death plague

Ancient teeth, found in tombstones in Central Asia, revealed significant details about Black Death's source, European universities are reporting.

What made researchers dig into the graves of the mountainous landlocked country? A Stirling research team with help from Germany's Max Planck Institute and University of Tubingen detectives analyzed ancient DNA samples from the teeth of skeletons in cemeteries near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan and found they contained Yersinia pestis. The bubonic plague, infamously known for causing the Black Death , is one of three different types of plague, along with septicemic and pneumonic.

The Black Death was a plague caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis that first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships, and proceeded to rapidly spread across ...

To understand how they develop and get transmitted, it is important to consider the environmental and socio-economic history contexts, in which these processes happen." To understand the phenomenon of emerging epidemic diseases, it is essential to have as 'bigger' evolutionary picture as possible. They also found that plague strains found today around the Central Asian Tian Shan mountain range (which runs through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang in China and Uzbekistan) are closely genetically related to the reconstructed ancient genomes from 1338-1339. The Black Death was a plague caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis that first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships, and proceeded to rapidly spread across Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East in the 1300s. During the analysis, plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis was detected in all three individuals," he said. "There are, in total, 467 headstones with precisely dated inscriptions, ranging from the years 1248 to 1345CE," Slavin said.

In a study published in the journal Science on June 15, researchers have claimed that the disease originated in modern day northern Kyrgyzstan around ...

Describing his experience from Siena in 1348, Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura wrote: “Great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. Norwegian historian Ole J Benedictow, who wrote extensively on the disease, estimated that around 60-65 per cent of Europe’s population or 52 million people died due to the plague. German physician Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker is credited with universalizing the term in his 1832 book Der Schwarze Tod (Black Death), which was translated to other languages as well. Some historians have argued that the plague originated in China, and spread across Europe by Italian merchants who first entered the continent in trading caravans through Crimea. However, historians argued that this term, which only emerged centuries later, had less to do with the disease’s clinical symptoms, and more to do with how European writers from the 19th century onwards understood the epidemic. Where did the Black Death — one of the deadliest epidemics in the history of humankind – exactly originate?

Researchers said their discovery "puts to rest one of the biggest questions in human history" - when and where the "most infamous killer of human" began.

The team, made up of scientists from the University of Stirling, the Max Planck Institute and the University of Tubingen, was able to track the skeletons down and take DNA from the teeth of seven people. The plague originated in Kyrgyzstan, central Asia, in the 1330s, analysis of DNA from the teeth of skeletons suggests. Researchers said their discovery "puts to rest one of the biggest questions in human history" - when and where the "most infamous killer of human" began.