A 14th-century pandemic may have started in Central Asia.
, said in an email. “Paleobiological historical plague studies are still in an early phase of development, we can expect a wealth of new interesting findings and many surprises in the future.”Infected fleas, whose rodent hosts have perished, typically transmit plague to people.has afflicted humans for more than a millenium, causing three separate pandemics that began in the 6th, 14th, and 19th centuries.
To trace its origin, Slavin and his collaborators examined the remains from two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in present-day Kyrgyzstan. The cemeteries had been excavated during the late 19th century but are much older: Tombstone inscriptions dated from 1338 to 1339 state that a number of the bodies had been victims of “pestilence.” To verify the identity of that pestilence, the team extracted genetic material from the teeth of seven individuals.
Many questions remain concerning the paper’s “larger implications” for the history of the Black Death and the pandemic it kicked off, she said. Among these are what conditions could have prompted the disease to spill from local rodents into people near Lake Issyk-Kul, or whether the infection might have instead been introduced from elsewhere.
“Right now it’s a good hypothesis; is it true or not, I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s definitely an interesting question which we should take into consideration.”who specializes in medical and medieval history, agrees with Varlık that the paper establishes 14th-century remains in Kyrgyzstan were infected with. But Green, who has studied the presence of plague in western Asia in the 1250s, isn’t convinced the findings determine the time period when this ancestral strain appeared.