![]() ![]() "That they were able to find these ancient plague samples was pretty remarkable," said Professor Holmes from the University of Sydney. 'Pretty remarkable'Īustralian infectious diseases expert Eddie Holmes was impressed by the research. "What's really amazing is its position shows that it came right before the Black Death," Dr Slavin said.Ī language specialist on the team helped translate other information that also supported the presence of the plague, including tombstones that recorded the cause of death as "pestilence". Until now that was the oldest genomic evidence of Black Death, but the Kyrgyzstan sequence is ancestral to the one from Volga, so confirms Central Eurasia as the origin of the pandemic. One of the genomes used for comparison came from bacteria the researchers previously isolated, from a sample further west, in the Volga region in Eastern Europe. This gave them a picture of the spread of the plague - like when we use genomic contact tracing to work out the movement of coronavirus through time and space. Then the researchers compared the sequence of the bacterial genome to others on file to map the relationship between them on a family tree. pestis, confirming the plague was to blame. Three of seven specimens came back positive for Y. Researchers turn to some very old teethĭr Slavin teamed up with geneticists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany to look for DNA of plague-causing bacteria in the teeth of a handful of people who died at the time. "All that was missing was the ancient DNA," Dr Slavin said. ![]() In studying records, Dr Slavin noticed a "massive spike" in the number of annual burials in the area between 13 and wondered whether there might be a link to the outbreak of the Black Death soon after.Īrchaeologists who had originally excavated the cemeteries in the 19th century had carefully matched hundreds of tombstones, complete with dates and epitaphs, with what was found beneath them. Dr Slavin and colleagues focused on remains from cemeteries located north-west of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, not far from the mighty Tian Shen mountains.
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