Ancient DNA Finally Uncovers the REAL Origin of the Black Death

#BlackDeath #PlagueOrigins #AncientDNA
Ancient DNA Finally Uncovers the REAL Origin of the Black Death

In 1338, a remote trading village in Central Asia buried over one hundred of its own, each grave marked by the word "Pestilence," nearly a decade before the Black Death ravaged Europe.

For centuries, the true origin of history's deadliest pandemic was lost in speculation. Forgotten bones in a Russian archive and a single engraved stone are about to change everything science thought it knew.

How did a silent outbreak here become a global catastrophe, and what did ancient DNA finally reveal that no one else could see?

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SOURCES & REFERENCES

PRIMARY RESEARCH:

Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A., et al. (2022). "The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia." Nature, 606(7915), 718-724. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04...

KEY RESEARCHERS:

Dr. Maria A. Spyrou – Lead Author, University of Tübingen & Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Dr. Philip Slavin – Senior Author, Medieval Historian, University of Stirling

Prof. Johannes Krause – Senior Author & Director, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Dr. Valeri I. Khartanovich – Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St. Petersburg

SCIENCE JOURNALISM:

Gibbons, A. (2022). "800-year-old graves pinpoint where the Black Death began." Science. https://www.science.org/content/artic...

Callaway, E. (2022). "Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death." Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...

SUPPORTING RESEARCH:

Spyrou, M.A., et al. (2019). "Phylogeography of the second plague pandemic revealed through analysis of historical Yersinia pestis genomes." Nature Communications, 10, 4470. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12...

Slavin, P. (2019). "Death by the Lake: Mortality Crisis in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 50, 59-90.

Benedictow, O.J. (2021). The Complete History of the Black Death. Boydell Press.