Ancient Teeth Reveal Possible Origin of Black Death Plague
The black death was a bubonic plague in the 14th century and is known as the most fatal pandemic in history, killing millions across Europe, Africa and Asia.
The Roman physician Galen coined the term “plague” to describe any quickly spreading disease. Epidemics of all kinds have been described as plagues, but the bubonic plague was a very specific disease.
The Black Death is the name given to the first wave of the plague that swept across Europe in the 1300′s. It was called a pandemic because it spread across many countries and affected many populations.
The cause of the bubonic plague comes from the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is commonly spread by fleas that bite their hosts (usually rats or humans) and introduce the bacteria into the host’s bodies.
For years, researchers have been looking for where the pandemic originated and recently found DNA evidence of the bacteria inside the ancient teeth from the bodies of people buried in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. The ancient teeth dates all the way back to 1338 when the plague was beginning to grow.
“What we found in this burial ground…was the ancestor of four of five of those lineages – so it’s really like the big bang of plague.” – Johannes Krause, PhD
Researchers believed for a long time that burial sites in Kyrgyzstan, which have 467 tombstones spanning nearly 900 years, could possibly have remains of people who died from the plague. There are 118 graves dated between 1338 and 1339, and the high number in just two years caught researchers’ attention.
Seven teeth from seven different people buried found evidence of the bacteria inside of dried blood vessels in the teeth. They then determined that the bacteria strain in the teeth was an ancestor of genomes from victims of the Black Death about 8 years later.
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