The Covid-19 pandemic, which is experiencing a clear and worrying setback these days in Europe and particularly in France, immediately revived in the collective consciousness the memory of two of the greatest public health disasters in history: the Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 people Millions of people died in a matter of months at the end of World War I and, older, the Black Death.
This, also known as the “Great Plague” or “Black Death”, associated with a mortality rate of 100% in a medieval world that changed it, devastated Europe in the 19th century, but also parts of Asia and North Africa.
In our latitudes, the Black Death pandemic would have decimated more than a third of the population, and tens of millions would have died in all affected areas.
But where did this bubonic disease, usually caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis discovered by Alexandre Yersin in 1894 and still raging in certain parts of the world today, come from? As the Guardian explains, the mystery has been almost complete so far.
However, scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, believe they can trace the early origins of this phenomenon seven centuries later, based on initial findings by Dr. Philip Slavin, a historian at Stirling University in Britain transcontinental wave of fear and death.
The Roots of Evil
According to them, it all started in the late 1330s near Lake Issyk-Kul in northeastern modern-day Kyrgyzstan. At two cemeteries in the region, Philip Slavin discovered a very high and equally anomalous number of stelae dating from 1248 to 1345 (467 to be exact) and 118 tombstones for the years 1338 and 1339 alone.
In short, something terrible struck the region at that time. Engraved on many of these stelae was the word “mawtānā,” a Syriac term meaning “plague” in English. The historian traced the bodies buried under these stones, which had been moved at the end of the 19th century, and was able to find some of the skeletons involved.
After tooth samples, tests were carried out by specialists in ancient DNA from the Max Planck Institute, in particular Professor Johannes Krause, with the support of Dr. Maria Spyrou from the University of Tübingen (Germany).
Several of these samples contained traces of the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which further analysis showed was the direct ancestor of the strain that reached Europe a few years later.
“We have actually localized the origins of the pandemic in terms of time and space, which is really remarkable,” said Johannes Krause. We have only discovered the ancestor of the Black Death, but also that of most of the tribes circulating in the world today.