The Silk Road stand is likely to be the epitome of some of the most devastating epidemics.People who died in the 14th century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that caused the Black Death parasites a few years later, according to a study of ancient genomes.”It’s like finding a place where all species come together, like the coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all from this Wuhan species,” said Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. , Germany, who led the research,
Between 1346 and 1353, the Black Death swept across western Eurasia, killing at least 60% of the population elsewhere. Historical records suggest that bubonic plague originated in the east: Caffa, on the Crimean peninsula, experienced a recorded outbreak of disease during the 1346 siege of the Mongol Empire. The Caucasus and other parts of Central Asia have been prioritized.China has hosted the largest genetic diversity of modern Y species. pestis, indicating the East Asian origin of the Black Death. “There were all sorts of ideas in the literature. And it was really known where it came from, ”said Krause.
Symptoms of the disease
A few years ago, Philip Slavin, an economist and environmental historian at the University of Stirling, UK, and his co-author of the study, discovered records from two 14th-century cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan, which he thought might hold them. references to the origins of the Black Death. The cemeteries, known as Kara-Djigach and Burana, contain an unusually high number of tombs of 1338 and 1339, ten of which speak explicitly of an epidemic.”If you have a year or two of overdose, it means something funny is going on there,” Slavin told a news conference.To determine whether the burial was related to the recent Black Death, Slavin worked with Krause to trace the remains of Kyrgyz cemeteries – excavated in the 1880s and 1890s and relocated to St Petersburg, Russia. The team, led by archaeologist Maria Spyrou at the University of Tübingen, Germany, traced the ancient DNA of seven people whose fossils were found, finding a Y. pestis DNA at three Kara-Djigach funerals.
A pair of Y. The complete pestis genomes found in the data showed that the strains were direct strains of Black Death-related species, including a Y-sample. pestis of a man who died in London by the Krause team that followed in 2011. Kara- The Djigach strain is also the ancestor of the great Y mass. pestis lineages today – a symbol, says Krause, of the Y-type explosion. pestis just before the Black Death. “It was like a massive outbreak of the disease,” he told a news conference.
Other evidence points to the origin of the Black Death in this part of Central Asia. Among the modern types of Y bacteria. pestis, taken from the wild by other rats in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang in northwestern China, around the Tian Shan mountain range, was closely related to the Kara-Djigach strain. “We can’t say it’s that valley or that valley, but it could be that region,” Krause said.Mice are the natural Y dam. pestis, and humans develop bubonic plague only when a flea-like vector passes through a virus. Krause suspects that close contact with infected mares triggered the Kyrgyzstan epidemic, with European rats rampant the Black Death.
Tian Shan makes sense as a Black Death activist, Slavin said. The region is located on the ancient trade route of Silk Road, and the Kyrgyzstan tombs are found with pearls from the Indian Ocean, corals from the Mediterranean and foreign coins, suggesting that distant goods passed through the area. “We can assume that trade, both long-distance and regional, must play a significant role in spreading the pathogen to the west,” Slavin said.
Ancient ‘death certificates’
Finding genomes from deadly bacteria from the Black Death genus is “a great achievement,” said Monica Green, a medieval historian and independent scientist in Phoenix, Arizona. “Heads are close as we will always get to the ‘death certificates’. So we know that this genealogy of Y. pestis existed at that time. ” But he is not sure of the conclusion of the study that the ‘massive outbreak’ of the disease occurred during the Kyrgyzstan genocide in 1338-39. Green considered, on the basis of genetic evidence, that the expansion of the thirteenth century of the Mongol Empire resulted in the spread and diversity of the Y species. pestis causing recent Black Death.
Sharon Dewitte, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, says the project opens the door to study the Black Death – and the widespread outbreak that was part of it, known as the second epidemic – across Europe. He looks forward to comparing the statistical patterns of deaths and deaths of people from the Kara-Djigach epidemic with those from the European Black Death Cemetery.”Having epidemic samples from ancient Asia and China will be even more exciting by adding more evidence to the Asian origins of the first and second epidemics,” adds Simon Rasmussen, a computer biologist at the University of Copenhagen. analyze the Y sequence. ancient pestis.Krause hopes to analyze fossils from China to see how the shocking epidemic in Europe recurred in East Asia, he said. “We would really like to get the Eastern part of the story.”
Source Journal Reference:EwenCallaway,Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death, Nature News (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01673-4
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