By: Lucas Sun

The Black Death killed more than 60 percent of the people of Eurasia and we are finally starting to uncover where it originated.

A group of researchers reported that they have found an answer in the pulp of the teeth that can trace them back to the beginning. The research shows that the Black Plague actually originated at a place around a lake near Issyk Kul, now known as Kyrgyzstan. The plague first infected a small settlement of traders before devastating Europe.

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.

The Black Death was named because of the black spots on victims’ bodies and was caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. Yersinia pestis is carried by fleas that are found on rodents and are still carried by them today. They are in every continent but Australia. Luckily it is not that common to be infected because hygiene nowadays is much better and bacteria is commonly cured by antibiotics.

The Black Death is actually the second outbreak caused by Y. pestis. The first one was called the Plague of Justinian, but the Black Death is still called the deadliest epidemic in history. One of the survivors wrote that the bumps would sometimes be as large as an apple or as big as an egg. It was known as the sign of impending death.

Historians have hit a wall: people can’t study the plague because it kills people so quickly that it doesn’t leave marks on their bones. But they have overcome this problem. They found a human tooth that had traces of plague on it.

Londoners knew that the Black Plague was coming so they had a graveyard premade. Researchers had the exact date the people died and it helped them figure out around when it started. A newer detective also found a lot of reported deaths from pestilence and those people died just 8 years before the Black Death hit Europe. Three of the people also had plague signs on their teeth.

Researchers concluded that the plague might have spread through trade routes instead of the military action earlier. There was a big bang where it spread and another four ancestral strains resulted from it. It might not be the final answer but evidence might pop up anywhere.

Source: Kolata, Gina. Where Did the Black Death Begin? DNA Detectives Find a Key Clue. By Fishing Shards of Bacterial DNA from the Teeth of Bodies in a Cemetery, Researchers Found the Starting Point for the Plague That Devastated Eurasia, They Say. 2022.