By: Anya Li

Scientists have wondered for years about where the infamous Black Death pandemic originated. Now, a group of researchers says the pulp of teeth from those buried in the 14th century has given them the answer.

Scientists suggest the Black Death arrived in 1338 or 1339 near Issyk-Kul, a lake in a mountainous area west of China in present-day Kyrgyzstan. The plague was said to have first infected people in a small nearby settlement of traders 8 years before it came up in Eurasia, killing approximately 60 percent of the population. Many bodies infected with the plague were found in this region, which is what led scientists to believe that this is where the disease began spreading.

Wolfgang Haak and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and Science of Human History in Germany led the investigation, and they were joined by Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland.

The bubonic plague was the bacterial infection responsible for the notorious Black Death pandemic and is named after the telltale black spots that appeared on those infected. It is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which is carried in the bite of fleas that live on rodents. The disease is still present today, carried still by rodents, and can be found on every continent except Australia. Nowadays, though, the plague is very treatable and can be cured using antibiotics.

The well-known 14th-century pandemic was actually the second large Y. pestis outbreak, with the first being the Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, said Mary Fissell, a medical historian at Johns Hopkins University. However, the Black Death is often considered one of, if not the deadliest, pandemics in human history.

Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer, and poet who lived through the plague when it hit Florence wrote a lot about the ordeal in his works, sharing that it “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.” This often signaled “impending death.”

Historians traced the outbreak’s path, finding it began in China or near the western border of the country and moved along trade routes, eventually arriving in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/health/black-death-plague.html