Angela
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Excellent summary and confirms what many of us suspected about its ultimate source.
See:
https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/tale-plagues
"In 2011, a team of 16 researchers led by Kirsten Bos, a physical anthropologist of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, announced they had recovered, sequenced and reconstructed the ancient genome ofYersinia pestis from Black Death victims in London.Their discovery proved that all current strains of Yersinia pestis originated during the 1347-51 pandemic. Further research then also successfully connected the Justinian Plague to Yersinia pestis.
In June 2018, another team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute, this time led by the archaeogeneticist Maria Spyrou, identified the oldest genome of Yersinia pestis, dating back 3,800 years. They recovered the strain from a Late Bronze Age burial in Russia, from the skeletons of two individuals who both carried the disease.
The 3,800-year-old strain is the ancestor of the Justinian Plague, of the Black Death, of the third pandemic and of the current plague strains.
By connecting past and present plagues, researchers have succeeded in mapping out the genealogical tree of the Yersinia pestis family.
Yersinia pestis’ history begins in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, an area spanning from central China to Eastern Tajikistan, bordered in the north by the Eurasian steppes of Mongolia. All three pandemics are now believed to have originated there.
It is no coincidence that recent cases of plague occurred around the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau. This region forms a ‘reservoir’ of the bacteria thanks to the presence there of rodents that carry it. In May, a Mongolian couple caught the plague after allegedly eating raw marmot kidneys. One of the recent Chinese plague patients was infected after eating a wild rabbit.
In the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the main plague vectors during the second pandemic were probably the jirds, small rodents found in North Africa, the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East that continue to carry Yersinia pestis today.
During the second pandemic, the Alps, with their large population of marmots, could have been a reservoir of plague, explaining why the disease became endemic for centuries in the West.
See:
https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/tale-plagues
"In 2011, a team of 16 researchers led by Kirsten Bos, a physical anthropologist of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, announced they had recovered, sequenced and reconstructed the ancient genome ofYersinia pestis from Black Death victims in London.Their discovery proved that all current strains of Yersinia pestis originated during the 1347-51 pandemic. Further research then also successfully connected the Justinian Plague to Yersinia pestis.
In June 2018, another team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute, this time led by the archaeogeneticist Maria Spyrou, identified the oldest genome of Yersinia pestis, dating back 3,800 years. They recovered the strain from a Late Bronze Age burial in Russia, from the skeletons of two individuals who both carried the disease.
The 3,800-year-old strain is the ancestor of the Justinian Plague, of the Black Death, of the third pandemic and of the current plague strains.
By connecting past and present plagues, researchers have succeeded in mapping out the genealogical tree of the Yersinia pestis family.
Yersinia pestis’ history begins in the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, an area spanning from central China to Eastern Tajikistan, bordered in the north by the Eurasian steppes of Mongolia. All three pandemics are now believed to have originated there.
It is no coincidence that recent cases of plague occurred around the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau. This region forms a ‘reservoir’ of the bacteria thanks to the presence there of rodents that carry it. In May, a Mongolian couple caught the plague after allegedly eating raw marmot kidneys. One of the recent Chinese plague patients was infected after eating a wild rabbit.
In the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the main plague vectors during the second pandemic were probably the jirds, small rodents found in North Africa, the Arabian peninsula and the Middle East that continue to carry Yersinia pestis today.
During the second pandemic, the Alps, with their large population of marmots, could have been a reservoir of plague, explaining why the disease became endemic for centuries in the West.
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