Origin of Black Death finally found in bacteria from Kyrgyzstan graves

There is a person by the name ofClare Wilson.

The Black Death was one of the most deadly epidemics of all time. The bacterium that started it all may have been found in some graves.

The plaguebacteria from historical graves seem to be the most recent common ancestor of the other groups when a genetic family tree is drawn up. "They are the strain that gave rise to the majority of strains that are circulating in the world today." The big bang of plague is what it is.

The first recorded emergence of the Black Death was in the city of Caffa in the year 1350. The plague caused people to flee to Europe. It was not known where the infection had come from before the peninsula was annexed.

Philip Slavin noticed that there were a lot of tombs with the dates of 1338 and 1339 engraved on them. The cause of death for some of them waspestilence. Something funny was going on when you had one or two years with excess mortality.

The plague-causing bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was recovered from three of the graves. To make a family tree, they need to compare it with other historical and modern samples of plague bacteriumDNA.

Many countries have Yersinia pestisbacteria, which is an infectious disease. The plaguebacteria affecting marmosets in the same region are similar to the ones from the graves.

It's possible that the plague jumped from animals to people in this area. This is another line of evidence. Thousands of genomes from rodents have been analysed. The closest relatives to the strain recovered from the graves are located there.

The journal is titled Nature.