[HN Gopher] Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death
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       Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death
        
       Author : rntn
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2022-06-15 19:47 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | INTPenis wrote:
       | Maybe it was just an outbreak of a much older disease?[1]
       | 
       | 1.
       | https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/4900-yea...
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
        
         | lionkor wrote:
         | Sorry, not from the US; Is "Black" a racist term no matter the
         | context?
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | stevenjgarner wrote:
           | "Because most people who got the plague died, and many often
           | had blackened tissue due to gangrene, bubonic plague was
           | called the Black Death." [1]
           | 
           | [1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21590-bubo
           | nic...
        
           | Enginerrrd wrote:
           | No.
        
       | aksss wrote:
       | TL;DR: earliest evidence of ancestor to Yersinia pestis found in
       | Kyrgyztan. Not saying that's the origin, just the earliest known
       | find of an ancestor so far.
       | 
       | Condensed version:
       | 
       | "People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now
       | Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium
       | Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible
       | several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient
       | genomes."
       | 
       | "Other evidence puts the origins of the Black Death in this part
       | of Central Asia. Among modern strains of Y. pestis bacteria,
       | those sampled from marmots and other rodents in Kyrgyzstan,
       | Kazakhstan and Xinjiang in northwest China, surrounding the Tian
       | Shan mountain range, were most closely related to the Kara-
       | Djigach strain. 'We can't really say it's that village or that
       | valley, but it's likely that region,' says Krause."
       | 
       | "[Miscellaneous scholar] is less sure of the study's conclusion
       | that the plague's 'big bang' occurred around the time of the
       | Kyrgyzstan deaths in 1338-39. Green has hypothesized, on the
       | basis of genetic evidence, that the thirteenth-century expansion
       | of the Mongol Empire catalysed the spread and diversification of
       | Y. pestis strains responsible for the later Black Death."
       | 
       | "Where is Kyrgyzstan":
       | 
       | https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kyrgyzstan/@36.2729637,68....
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | hinkley wrote:
       | > held an unusually high number of tombstones dated to 1338 and
       | 1339, ten of which made explicit reference to a pestilence.
       | 
       | > "When you have one or two years with excess mortality, it means
       | something funny is going on there," Slavin said at a press
       | briefing.
       | 
       | When you have more than a couple of years of 'excess mortality'
       | the ratio of tombstones to deaths may also decline. That's why we
       | also look for mass graves. They can contain people nobody wants
       | to bury (eg, dead Vikings after a failed invasion) or people
       | nobody _can_ bury.
       | 
       | An unusually high number in 1338 and 1339 may indicate a two year
       | plague, or that people gave up it 1340.
        
       | zeristor wrote:
       | So what was the Antoine plague then?
        
         | KSS42 wrote:
         | Likely smallpox.
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-15 23:00 UTC)