Archaeogenetics: The Black Death came from Kyrgyzstan

The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, probably originated on the Silk Road. In the 14th century, where Kyrgyzstan is today, people died of the plague: they had contracted the bacterium Yersinia pestis infected. This belongs to bacterial strains from which the pathogens of the medieval plague in Europe emerged a few years later, as a recent study has shown.

“It’s like finding the place where all the lineages come together – like with the coronavirus, where we have alpha, delta, omicron, all of which emerged from this one strain of virus in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, archaeogeneticist at Max Planck -Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and one of the main authors of the study…