Scientists discover in Central Asia the true origin of the Black Death, the largest pandemic in history

Mystery solved. A team of scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), the University of Tübingen (Germany) and the University of Stirling (United Kingdom) has managed to place the origin of the black plaguethe largest pandemic in history: in the region of the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia in the first half of the fourteenth century. In this way, they have cleared up one of the great unknowns of science. thus clearing up one of the greatest mysteries of science.

The plague reached Mediterranean in the middle of XIV century via commercial ships from the Black Sea, and spread across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in a first large-scale outbreak known as the Black Death, which dragged on into a pandemic until the early 19th century, causing the death of more than half of the European population. According to this study published this Wednesday in the journal Nature, this group of experts tracked the Origins of the first strain of the bacterium Cause of the Black Death: Yersinia pestis.

Thus, they managed to locate their beginning in the Issyk Kul lake region, in present-day Kyrgyzstan. Many theories placed the origin of this pandemic in places in Asia such as China or Mongolia, but in this study, the researchers showed that the initial outbreak occurred in this region of Central Asia, an area crossed by important trade routes of the Silk Road in the Middle Ages. This finding was possible thanks to the investigation of human remains that were discovered in two cemeteries in this region of Asia in excavations carried out almost 140 years ago.

Some tombstones, the key to discovery

Nail inscriptions found on the tombstones in these niches indicated in syriac language that the individuals buried there died in the years 1338 and 1339 because of an unknown epidemic. The researchers analyzed the ancient DNA of these human remains, as well as historical and archaeological data from these two communities affected by this mysterious disease, and certified the presence of the bacterium Yersinia pestis.

“The most important thing is not only that we detected the Yersinia pestis bacterium in these burials,” Philip Slavin, a researcher at the University of Stirling, told Efe, “but, in terms of evolution, that same bacterium is at the origin of the Black Death pandemic”. “In other words, it’s an older strain than the Black Death strain from Europe. To be more precise, it’s the strain that exactly coincides with the start of the pandemic,” Slavin said.

The study suggests that at some point in the fourteenth century there was an event that researchers call “Big Bang”a massive diversification of plague strains, which they associate with the genesis of the first great wave of the Black Death in Europe between 1346 and 1353.

The team managed to sequence the complete genomes of that first plague from the burials of Kyrgyzstan and discovered that these ancient strains “are located exactly at the node of origin of this massive diversification event”, in the words of Maria Spyrou, a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Scientists concluded that the ancient Central Asian strain that caused the plague epidemic 1338 and 1339 in Kyrgyzstan it jumped to humans from the populations of marmots in this region, which act as reservoirs for the bacteria, and which later mutated into different variants that spread throughout the world.

“This strain precedes this ‘Big Bang,’ which was a pivotal evolutionary event, and any such event has to evolve from a previous strain,” says Slavin. The researcher draws an analogy with the coronavirus pandemic: “We have Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Omicron… Omicron evolved from Delta, and Delta evolved of Gamma. It may not be the best comparison, but what we do know is that this strain preceded to that of the Black Death”.