Ancient DNA traces origin of Black Death

> 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.

If I was a disease, then reacting to circumstance of a trade route, I would hope my gene expression and natural selection helped me: I want to survive on trade goods, in food, in a host animal (without killing it too soon) and "flow" along a path, which in human scale for the time takes months, if not years to move.

Plague looks to have hit the spot: it does kill, and it does cause horrific sequelae, but it also survives long enough to spread.

Bubonic/Pneumonic expression probably helps, two forms means two vector-paths. Host of rats/fleas, well rats are pretty hardy, adaptable, and good at both hiding and breeding rapidly. So they can carry long distances in trade goods, and then bust out to exploit local food sources. Or, just move alongside the trade goods by chance, following the inadequate hygene of the road/river camps. (obviously, hiding on boats also works but the silk road was predominantly a land route)

Nothing those pesky humans did was going to interfere until two things happened: they learned some basic hygene, and they learned a couple of low-bar tricks to immunise, and then finally they invented antibiotics.

But I probably have a trick or two up my sleeve to fight back. Lets start with "helping" them make antibiotics less reliable, and then lets think about other strategies..

Maybe it was just an outbreak of a much older disease?[1]

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/4900-yea...

I wonder why the plague didn't generate pandemics or epidemics earlier than it's mentioned in the article.

Is it possible that it only infected animals at first and only later find a way to infect humans like Monkeypox or SARS-CoV-2?

So what was the Antoine plague then?

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....

is Kyrgyzstan where the ugurs are being persecuted by china?