By: Andy Xu

Through finding shards of bacterial DNA in teeth from the deceased bodies of

plague victims in a cemetery, a group of researchers were able to discover the

unlikely origins of the deadly disease which killed a third of Europe’s

population.

Researchers 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,

found that the earliest strand of the Black Death originated from a small

settlement of traders between the years 1338 or 1339. It grew in what is now

known as Kyrgyzstan but remained dormant for eight years before it was

unleashed in Eurasia.

The bubonic plague, otherwise known as the Black Death because of how

lethal it was during the 14th century and the common symptom of black dots

that appear on its victim’s bodies, is caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium.

This bacterium is transported through the fleas living on rodents.

Giovanni Boccaccio, a first-hand witness of the effects of the Black Death,

noted that the disease “showed its first signs in men and women alike by

means of swellings either in the groin or under the armpits, some of which

grew to the size of an ordinary apple and others to the size of an egg, and the

people called them buboes,” which became known as “signs of impending

death.”

The researchers started their detective adventure in London and analyzed the

teeth of deceased plague victims in a graveyard. They found that bacteria

DNA was present in the teeth and continued this process in many different

burial sites around Europe. The researchers then concluded that an event

they called the Big Bang was what led to the formation of 4 different strands

of the bubonic plague. They then wanted to find when and where this so-called Big Bang occurred.

One of the researchers, Dr. Slavin was aware that there were two Christian

burial sites in Kyrgyzstan and wanted to see if the plague

killed people in that burial site. Through finding plague DNA in some of the

people that were buried, and along with engravings on the tombstone that

said that those people died of a mysterious “pestilence,” the researchers

concluded that the strain in Kyrgyzstan was indeed the Big Bang they were

looking for after all.