Ancient DNA solves mystery of the Black Death’s origin after nearly 700 years

Researchers believe they have pinpointed the region where the Black Death began in the 1330s and 1340s by sequencing ancient DNA found in the bodies of plague victims.

Researchers believe they may have found ground zero for the deadliest plague in human history, the Black Death — pulling the veil off a mystery that has been shrouded for nearly 700 years.

A paper published in Nature on Wednesday details how a team of archaeologists and geneticists sequenced the genome of plague bacteria found in medieval corpses that predate the first plague outbreaks in Eurasia. The make-up of this ancient bacterial DNA has led researchers to believe it was the origin for almost all subsequent strains of bubonic plague.

Samples of this original Yersinia pestis bacteria, the pathogen that causes bubonic plague, were found in northern Kyrgyzstan, in villages that were along the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia.

The study began several years ago when Philip Slavin, an economic and environmental historian for the University of Stirling, came across records that a pair of 14th-century cemeteries had a significant amount of tombstones dated from 1338 to 1339. Ten of these tombstones explicitly referenced pestilence.

This was unusual because, prior to this study, the earliest deaths associated with the plague were in 1346 in the Crimean Peninsula.

“When you have one or two years with excess mortality, it means something funny is going on there,” Slavin said at a news conference.

The cemeteries are known as Kara-Djigach and Burana, and are situated in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains. The burial grounds once serviced a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley but were excavated in the late 1800s. The bodies were all moved to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Led by archaeogeneticist Maria Spyrou, the research team sequenced DNA from the teeth of seven people whose bodies were recovered from the two sites. Three of the bodies from Kara-Djigach still contained Yersinia pestis.