Where and when did the Black Death originate? The question has been asked for centuries.
Now, a group of researchers reports it has found the answer in the pulp of teeth from people buried in the 14th century.
Based on their analysis, the researchers report that the Black Death arrived in 1338 or 1339 near Issyk-Kul, a lake in a mountainous area just west of China in what is now Kyrgyzstan. The plague first infected people in a nearby settlement of traders eight years before it devastated Eurasia, killing 60% of the population.
The investigation was led by Wolfgang Haak and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Science of Human History in Germany as well as Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland.
What was known as the Black Death — named after black spots that appeared on victims’ bodies — is caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that is carried by fleas that live on rodents. The disease is still present today. But infections are rare because hygiene is better. Infections are easily cured with antibiotics.
Historians traced the epidemic’s path — it apparently began in China or near the western border of China and moved along trade routes to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
But Monica Green, a medical historian, said historians would never be able to answer the question they raised: Was it really Yersinia pestis that caused this pandemic?
She said a paleopathologist 20 years ago had told her plague could not be studied because a disease that kills people so quickly does not leave any traces on bone.
Now that impasse has been overcome.
The hunt goes back more than a decade, to when the group that led the latest study stunned archaeologists with their report that they could find plague bacteria DNA in the teeth of skeletons.
That study involved plague victims in London.
Fourteenth-century Londoners knew the Black Death was coming, so they consecrated a graveyard in advance to be prepared for its victims. The bodies were exhumed and are now kept in the Museum of London. The situation was ideal because not only were these victims from a plague graveyard, but the date of their death was known.
The researchers found plague DNA in the teeth of three individuals whose tombstones said had they died of "pestilence.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2022 The New York Times Company
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