posted on 06/16/2022 06:00
(Image credit: AS Leybin/Disclosure)
Between 1346 and 1353, a bacterium wiped out about 60% of the population of Eurasia, a region that includes European and Asian countries. Over the next 500 years, a pandemic would cause millions of deaths, not knowing the origin of the socalled black or bubonic plague, due to the victims’ swollen lymph nodes, much like onions. Only in the 19th century did the French bacteriologist identify the cause of the disease: Yersinia pestis, a bacillus transmitted by infected animals. However, it remained to know the origin of the pathogen.
If Jews were blamed for the pandemic in medieval and modern times, China also emerged as a possible birthplace of Y. pestis the discovery of the bacillus was in Hong Kong. Discussions have continued until now, when a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Tübingen in Germany and the University of Stirling in Scotland unraveled the mystery. Using a genetic analysis of seven individuals, the scientists found that the pathogen appeared in the region of Lake IssykKu near Kyrgyzstan, which formed the Silk Road. These interconnected routes were used by merchants between Asia, Africa and Europe to transport a wide variety of products. At the stop, sometime at the location researchers have now pointed out, Y.pestis hitchhiked into the caravans and reached the old continent.
“There have been several different hypotheses suggesting that the pandemic could have originated in East Asia, specifically China, Central Asia, India, or even near where the first outbreaks occurred in 1346 in the Black Sea and the… southwestern regions of the Caspian Sea have been documented,” archaeogeneticist and lead author Maria Spyrou of the University of Tübingen told an online press conference. “We know that trade was probably a key factor in the spread of the plague in Europe during the onset of the Black Death. It is reasonable to assume that similar processes determined the spread of the disease from Central Asia to the Black Sea between 1338 and 1346.” The article was published in the journal Nature.
The outskirts of Kyrgyzstan was one of the suspicious places because the only archeological trace of the plague was found there. 120 years ago, remains of cemeteries named KaraDjigach and Burana in the region were excavated and transferred to St. Petersburg, Russia. There was an important clue there: explicit references to a specific plague on the tombstones.
According to historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland and coauthor of the study, Tian Shan — the mountain system that borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the Uyghur Autonomous Region (western China) and is the epicenter of the plague — makes every sense of the word. The region lies on the ancient silk trade route, and Kyrgyz tombs contained Indian Ocean beads, Mediterranean coral and foreign coins, suggesting distant goods flowed through the area. “We can hypothesize that trade, both longdistance and regional, must have played an important role in the westward spread of the pathogen,” Slavin said.
sequencing
Some of the grave material was analyzed by the team from Germany, sequencing the entire genome of seven people. Since the genetic information of Y. pestis has been fully deciphered over the past year, it has been possible to compare the materials. Now there seems to be no doubt: these individuals were victims of the Black Death. “Our discovery that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts an end to centuriesold debates,” Slavin said.
According to the authors, this tribe not only spawned the Black Death, but also most of the plague pathogens still circulating. Although many people believe the disease has been eradicated, there are localized outbreaks of the disease in many Asian and African countries. Researchers emphasized that Y.pestis survives in wild rodent populations around the world. The old Central Asian variant that caused the epidemic around Lake IssykKul in 13381339 must have come from one of these reservoirs.
“We found that the modern strains, which are most closely related to the ancient strain, are now found in plague reservoirs around the Tian Shan Mountains, very close to where the ancient strain was found. This points to an origin of the Black Death’s ancestor in Central Asia.” , explained Johannes Krause, first author of the study and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, at the press conference. While this terrible pandemic is closely linked to Europe, it has also devastated Asian countries.
Now researchers want to assess the remains found in China to unravel the eastern side of this chapter of history. “Having more samples of pests from ancient Asia and China will be very interesting to provide even more evidence for the Asian origin of the first and second pandemics,” added Simon Rasmussen, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with the magazine Nature analyzed old sequences of Y. pestis.
-
Professor Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute gave a lecture to a full audience in which he uncovered the genetic history of the Ryukyuaner | OIST………………………………………… . ………………………………………….. …………….. ………………………….. … …………………. …………………. … …………………. Photo: Overfelt Erica/Disclosure
-
Tian Shan, Central Asian mountains, through which merchants transported various products from East to West: Plague hitchhiked in caravans in Europe Johannes Krause: The root of all subsequent plagues is the tribe identified in the cemetery Photo: Ruslan Aitbajew
