Summary about the plague from ancient dna

[Angela]

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.

 

[bicicleur 2]

eating raw marmot kidneys ..

it must be a delicacy
Yummi

 

[Angela]

I was thinking the same thing. HIV has been hypothetically linked to eating not thoroughly cooked monkey parts.

I mean, I know that in certain times and/or places protein is hard to come by, but cook the damn thing!

All of these respiratory viruses also come from that general part of the world, from chickens and other fowl. Well, China itself, not the steppe.

My dad almost never ate chicken; he thought they were filthy animals. All the more reason to be really careful keeping and handling them.

Of course, he then turned around and ate that maggoty cheese from Sardinia. I suppose he would have argued that an animal which eats its own excrement is beyond the pale, but actually it's probably just that people are rarely consistent.

 

[bicicleur 2]

I was thinking the same thing. HIV has been hypothetically linked to eating not thoroughly cooked monkey parts.

I mean, I know that in certain times and/or places protein is hard to come by, but cook the damn thing!

All of these respiratory viruses also come from that general part of the world, from chickens and other fowl. Well, China itself, not the steppe.

My dad almost never ate chicken; he thought they were filthy animals. All the more reason to be really careful keeping and handling them.

Of course, he then turned around and ate that maggoty cheese from Sardinia. I suppose he would have argued that an animal which eats its own excrement is beyond the pale, but actually it's probably just that people are rarely consistent.

I entered a restaurant in China. My wife was with me that time.
We entered the kitchen to select which alive animal we were going to eat.
We decided that the chicken would be the safest bet.
But then they told us that they didn't have an oven, they could only steam it, which means it would still be red.
I don't remember any more, but I guess we finally didn't eat that day.

 

[Angela]

I entered a restaurant in China. My wife was with me that time.
We entered the kitchen to select which alive animal we were going to eat.
We decided that the chicken would be the safest bet.
But then they told us that they didn't have an oven, they could only steam it, which means it would still be red.
I don't remember any more, but I guess we finally didn't eat that day.

You're talking to the already converted. My mother taught me to handle chicken as if it's nuclear waste! She soaked it in plenty of salted water before she even handled it, and she was taught to do that with farm chickens, not the dirty, diseased chickens we get from mass production facilities. Later on I discovered that's what Americans call "wet brining", and brining dramatically also enhances flavor, although I now "dry brine" it under a coating of salt and spices to get crispy skin.

That's why it never made sense to me that prosciutto, for example, which is salt "cooked", couldn't be imported here for a long time. You're safer with food preserved with salt than with what comes "fresh" from the supermarket.

I know a very well traveled couple, gourmands, of a sort, who were very excited about the food they'd be getting in mainland China. They both lost quite a bit of weight, instead.

 

[bicicleur 2]

You're talking to the already converted. My mother taught me to handle chicken as if it's nuclear waste! She soaked it in plenty of salted water before she even handled it, and she was taught to do that with farm chickens, not the dirty, diseased chickens we get from mass production facilities. Later on I discovered that's what Americans call "wet brining", and brining dramatically also enhances flavor, although I now "dry brine" it under a coating of salt and spices to get crispy skin.

That's why it never made sense to me that prosciutto, for example, which is salt "cooked", couldn't be imported here for a long time. You're safer with food preserved with salt than with what comes "fresh" from the supermarket.

I know a very well traveled couple, gourmands, of a sort, who were very excited about the food they'd be getting in mainland China. They both lost quite a bit of weight, instead.

I remember I have had 1 good meal in China though.
It was the evening before I left, I was on my own.
I don't know how it was made.
It was dried duck.
I had to peel off the dried meat from the carcass of the duck.
I ate it slowly with 2 glasses of beer.
It was very nice.