At least tens of millions of people died when inguinal plague hit the continents, possibly spreading along trade routes. Despite intense efforts to uncover the source of the epidemic, the lack of solid evidence has left the question open. “Basically we traced the origins to time and space, which is really remarkable,” said Johannes Krause, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “We found not only the ancestor of the Black Death, but the ancestor of most plague strains circulating in the world today.” Map The international team came together to work out the puzzle when Dr. Philip Slavin, a historian at the University of Stirling, discovered evidence of a sudden increase in deaths in the late 1330s in two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in the north of modern times. Kyrgyzstan. Among 467 tombstones dating between 1248 and 1345, Slavin spotted a huge increase in deaths, with 118 stones dating from 1338 or 1339. Inscriptions on some of the tombstones referred to the cause of death as “mawtānā”, the term of the Syrian language for “plague”. The epitaph on this tombstone, written in Syrian, writes: “The year 1649 [AD 1337-8], and it was the year of the tiger. This is the tomb of the faithful Sanmaq. [He] died of a plague. ” Photo: AS Leybin, August 1886 Further research revealed that the sites had been excavated in the late 1880s, with about 30 skeletons being removed from their graves. After studying the excavation logs, Slavin and his associates located some of the remains and attached them to specific tombstones in the cemetery. The research was then passed on to experts in ancient DNA, including Krause and Dr. Maria Spyrou at the University of Tübingen in Germany. They extracted genetic material from the teeth of seven people who were buried in cemeteries. Three of them contained DNA from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes inguinal plague. A complete analysis of the bacterium’s genome revealed that it was a direct ancestor of the strain that caused the Black Death in Europe eight years later and was therefore probably the cause of death for more than half of the continent’s population over the next decade or so. The closest living relative of the strain has now been found in rodents in the same area, scientists said. While humans continue to be infected with inguinal plague, better hygiene and less contact with rat fleas that can transmit the infection to humans have prevented further deadly plague pandemics.
