Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century.
Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346.
"We know that trade was likely a determining factor to the dispersal of plague into Europe during the beginning of the Black Death. It is reasonable to hypothesize that similar processes determined the spread of the disease from Central Asia to the Black Sea between 1338 and 1346," Spyrou added. "Already in medieval times we see the high mobility and fast spread of a human pathogen," said archaeogeneticist and study co-author Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. "We should not underestimate the potential of pathogens to spread around the world from rather remote locations, likely due to a zoonotic event" - an infectious disease jumping from animals to people.
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