A medieval cemetery yields DNA evidence of the deadly pandemic bacterium’s Central Asian ancestor
In 1338 or 1339 “Bačaq, a faithful woman” in her 40s who stood just four feet, eight inches, died and was buried in the Kara-Djigach cemetery, about seven miles outside Bishkek, the capital of what is now Kyrgyzstan. Her tombstone was inscribed in Syriac, an Aramaic dialect. She was one of 114 people buried there during those two years—who accounted for one quarter of all the cemetery’s burials while it was in operation from 1245 to 1345.
The study analyzed the teeth of five women and two men whom archaeologist Nikolay Pantusov exhumed in the late 19th century from the cemetery in Kara-Djigach and another in the village of Burana, about 35 miles east. Their skulls had been stored in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Because the newly recovered strain resembles modern ones found in animals in the region, Spyrou and her colleagues suggest it originated in the nearby Tian Shan mountain region on the border of Kyrgyzstan and China, when the bacterium jumped from rodent hosts—likely marmots—to humans.
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