Angela
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Coincidentally, we were talking about the Black Death on another thread. This group of researchers have tried to quantify the number of deaths through pottery remains.
See:
http://www.archaeology.org/news/4486-160524-england-tracking-the-black-death
"LINCOLN, ENGLAND—Examination of pottery from a widespread excavation campaign in eastern England supports the idea that there was a massive demographic collapse in the wake of the Black Death, which ravaged the country between 1346 and 1351.Because relatively few plague burials have been found, some scholars have doubted that the scale of depopulation was as great as medieval accounts suggest. But The Guardian reports that University of Lincoln archaeologist Carenza Lewis decided to test that hypothesis by using the relative amounts of domestic pottery recovered from different levels of some 2,000 standard test pits as a proxy for human population levels. Volunteers dug the pits in 55 rural locations known to have been occupied in the fourteenth century, and Lewis then analyzed the tens of thousands of pottery sherds that were recovered. Her study suggests the Black Death was responsible for an average population decline of 45 percent in the region, with some sites showing evidence of even steeper declines of up to 85 percent. To read more about medieval archaeology in this part of England, go to “Writing on the Church Wall.”"
I've done a bit of research into the matter in my own area, and the results indicate much the same thing. Our local archives are very complete in some places. In Fivizzano, a town on the "Tuscan side" of the Lunigiana, 85% of the inhabitants died during the worst plague outbreak. Some surnames totally died out. Closer to where I was born it was about 50%. It's strange in a way because you'd think there would have been more movement along the Magra River Valley than over the mountains. On the other hand, Fivizzano was always tied strongly to Firenze, which was very hard hit. It might also have been a slight difference in genetic immunity, or else in some places they had more warning and isolated themselves better.
I once had a discussion about this on the old dnaforums site. The feeling was that looking at the consequences strictly from a statistical point of view, this would have had no effect on haplotypes, for instance. I'm still not totally convinced. The y chromosome may not have anything to do with immunity genes per se, but we know that mtDna and the X chromosome for that matter code for health related traits. Isn't mtDna "H" supposed to correlate with a better immune response to infection and higher fertility?
I think I remember reading somewhere that resistance to the plague correlates somewhat with resistance to HIV. If so, maybe my mtDna U2e is partly responsible for the fact that 23andme tells me I'd have very little to no resistance to HIV? We U2e people certainly have undergone a precipitous decline since the Mesolithic, and maybe it wasn't all about population movements.
See:
http://www.archaeology.org/news/4486-160524-england-tracking-the-black-death
"LINCOLN, ENGLAND—Examination of pottery from a widespread excavation campaign in eastern England supports the idea that there was a massive demographic collapse in the wake of the Black Death, which ravaged the country between 1346 and 1351.Because relatively few plague burials have been found, some scholars have doubted that the scale of depopulation was as great as medieval accounts suggest. But The Guardian reports that University of Lincoln archaeologist Carenza Lewis decided to test that hypothesis by using the relative amounts of domestic pottery recovered from different levels of some 2,000 standard test pits as a proxy for human population levels. Volunteers dug the pits in 55 rural locations known to have been occupied in the fourteenth century, and Lewis then analyzed the tens of thousands of pottery sherds that were recovered. Her study suggests the Black Death was responsible for an average population decline of 45 percent in the region, with some sites showing evidence of even steeper declines of up to 85 percent. To read more about medieval archaeology in this part of England, go to “Writing on the Church Wall.”"
I've done a bit of research into the matter in my own area, and the results indicate much the same thing. Our local archives are very complete in some places. In Fivizzano, a town on the "Tuscan side" of the Lunigiana, 85% of the inhabitants died during the worst plague outbreak. Some surnames totally died out. Closer to where I was born it was about 50%. It's strange in a way because you'd think there would have been more movement along the Magra River Valley than over the mountains. On the other hand, Fivizzano was always tied strongly to Firenze, which was very hard hit. It might also have been a slight difference in genetic immunity, or else in some places they had more warning and isolated themselves better.
I once had a discussion about this on the old dnaforums site. The feeling was that looking at the consequences strictly from a statistical point of view, this would have had no effect on haplotypes, for instance. I'm still not totally convinced. The y chromosome may not have anything to do with immunity genes per se, but we know that mtDna and the X chromosome for that matter code for health related traits. Isn't mtDna "H" supposed to correlate with a better immune response to infection and higher fertility?
I think I remember reading somewhere that resistance to the plague correlates somewhat with resistance to HIV. If so, maybe my mtDna U2e is partly responsible for the fact that 23andme tells me I'd have very little to no resistance to HIV? We U2e people certainly have undergone a precipitous decline since the Mesolithic, and maybe it wasn't all about population movements.