By: Emily Ren

is this supposed to be a hard lead or a soft lead? Also, what is the correct format for citing from the article?

The horrific and widely-known Black Death was a plague that killed sixty percent of the Eurasian population, and its origination is a mystery that a group of researchers were determined to solve. Recently, they have discovered a crucial clue from a group of burials seven to eight years before the black plague was known to start.

The plague had signature symptoms, of which Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer, documented. The plague, as Boccaccio noted, “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 were eventually known to be “signs of impending death.” However, they are not able to be seen after the centuries of aging. Fortunately, these researchers have discovered that the plague DNA can be found within the teeth of victims centuries after they have died, and the DNA was found in Kyrgyzstan.

Two Christian cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan showed tombstones that were inscribed with Syriac, detailing that the person died of “pestilence”; these researchers found the plague DNA in the teeth of three of the individuals there. Additionally, the death rates in the year of the mortalities had soared. Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland described the event in an interview with Gina Kolata from The New York Times, explaining, “That brought it to my attention because it wasn’t just any year.” The year was 1338, “just seven or eight years before the Black Death came to Europe.”

These findings highlight the possibility that the plague had originated from that village, instead of being spread by the Mongols in a war conquest during the 1200s. As reported by the researchers, the strain found in Kyrgyzstan separated into four different strains.

Monica H Green, a medical historian and independent scholar, believes that there will be more evidence to uncover, but at the current moment, the evidence found is not enough to support the claims of these researchers.

For now, the researchers have uncovered a promising lead.

Link to Article: https://s3.amazonaws.com/appforest_uf/f1655668260851x709957888057212800/Black%20Death_%20A%20Clue%20to%20Where%20the%20Plague%20Originated%20-%20The%20New%20York%20Times.pdf