The plague of the Black Death or the black death that had hit Europe was indeed very terrible, with so many people being infected. The cause is still uncertain, but now scientists believe they have uncovered it.
The Black Death Plague was the beginning of a pandemic that was approximately 500 years old. In just 8 years from 1346 to 1353, it is estimated that 60% of the population in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were killed by the bubonic plague, dubbed the Black Death.
Now as quoted by us from Yahoo News, Friday (17/6/2022) researchers concluded that the source of the Black Death outbreak was from the Kyrgyz region, after they analyzed DNA from ancient graves.
"We were able to put an end to all these centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian at the University of Striling Scotland who was part of the research team.
In research published in the journal Nature, Slavin initially suspected the exposure in 1890 described ancient graves in northern Kyrgyzstan. In the years 1338 to 1339, there was a very high increase in deaths suspected of being caused by pestilence.
Means the time is about 7 years before the outbreak of the terrible Black Death. So, Slavin teamed up with specialists to examine the DNA from the grave. They took DNA from the teeth of seven people buried there.
From there, it was confirmed that DNA from the bacterium Yersinia pestis that caused the bubonic plague had been found. Subsequent analysis concluded that the bacterium was the direct parent of the strain that caused the Black Death in Europe several years later.
The Black Death still exists today, but it's not as violent as it used to be. At its peak hundreds of years ago, one of the most affected countries was Italy, where about 33% of the population died from the Black Death.