Though the stakes are lower than in the case of covid-19, the debate on the Black Death’s origin is just as fraught
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskInsight into the Black Death’s origins came in 2012, when Cui Yujun’s team at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology sequenced genomes of, the plague bacterium, collected from five countries. Dr Cui’s results suggested four lineages of the bug had emerged in quick succession during an evolutionary big bang.
Dr Spyrou and her colleagues concluded this by analysing samples from two cemeteries alongside Lake Issyk-Kul, near the border with Kazakhstan. The gravestones here, which are disproportionately marked with dates corresponding to 1338 and 1339, have attracted plague scholars’ attention for decades, both because of the high mortality rate they imply and of the epitaphs’ invocation of an unnamed pestilence as the cause of death.
Dr Spyrou’s proposal conflicts with a high-profile hypothesis published recently by Monica Green, a historian of medicine, that the Black Death was spread westwards by the advance of Mongol armies under Genghis Khan’s successors throughout the 1200s. This would explain historical mentions of pestilence dating to this period . It does, however, depend on the polytomy having happened in the 1200s , rather than the 1300s.
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