The origins of black death have been discovered more than 600 years after it entered the human population, according to scientists.
Medieval bubonic plague was first recorded in the 14th century and was the beginning of a wave of nearly 500-year-old killer diseases called the Second Plague Pandemic.
The Black Death killed millions and was considered one of the greatest infectious disease catastrophes in human history.
Despite years of research, the geographical and chronological origin of the disease remained a mystery.
But researchers say the black plague first originated in northern Kyrgyzstan in the late 1330s.
The team, from Stirling University in Scotland and the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of Tübingen, analyzed ancient DNA (aDNA) extracted from skeletal teeth discovered in cemeteries near Lake Issyk. Kul in the Tian Shan region of Kyrgyzstan.
They were attracted to these sites after identifying a large increase in the number of burials there in 1338 and 1339, according to Stirling University historian Dr. Philip Slavin, who helped make the discovery.
The team found that the cemeteries, in Kara-Djigach and Burana, had already been excavated in the late 1880s, with about 30 skeletons extracted from the graves, but were able to trace them and analyze the DNA extracted from the teeth of seven individuals.
Sequencing, which determines the structure of DNA, showed that three individuals carried Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that is linked to the onset of the black plague outbreak before it reached Europe.
“Our study highlights one of the biggest and most fascinating questions in history and determines when and where the most notorious and infamous human killer began,” Dr. Slavin said.
Part of his job was to study the historical diaries of the original excavations in order to match the individual skeletons with their tombstones, carefully translating the inscriptions, which were written in Syriac.
Dr. Maria Spyrou, of the University of Tübingen, and the first author of the study, said: “Despite the risk of environmental pollution and no guarantee that the bacteria could have been preserved, we were able to sequence the DNA. of seven individuals discovered from two of these cemeteries.
“The most exciting thing is that we found DNA from the plague bacterium in three individuals.”
Professor Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig added: “Like Covid, the Black Death was an emerging disease and the beginning of a great pandemic that lasted about 500 years.
“It’s very important to really understand the circumstances in which it arose.”
The origins of the Black Death have been debated by historians for centuries and postulated by medieval chroniclers since its appearance in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa 675 years ago.
The research study, The source of the Black Death in 14th-century central Eurasia, has been published in the journal Nature.