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Where and when did the Black Death appear? The question has been asked for centuries and has sparked heated debate among historians.

Now, a group of researchers reports they’ve found the answer in the pulp of the teeth of people buried in the 14th century.

Based on their analysis of the preserved genetic material, the researchers reported that the Black Death came in 1338 or 1339, near lake Issyk-Kul in a mountainous region just west of China, which is now Kyrgyzstan. Eight years before the plague devastated Eurasia, it infected people in a small nearby merchant settlement and killed 60 percent of its victims.

The investigation was led by Wolfgang Haak and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Science of Human History in Germany, and Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland. He described his findings in Nature Wednesday..

Known as the Black Death, named after the black spots that appear on victims’ bodies, the bacteria Yersinia pestis is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by fleas that live on rodents. The disease, carried by rodents, still exists today on every continent except Australia. But infections are rare as hygiene is better. Infections are easily treated with antibiotics.

The 14th century plague was actually the second major outbreak of Y. pestis—the first was the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century,’ said Mary Fissell, a medical historian at Johns Hopkins University. But the Black Death is the best known and is considered one of the deadliest epidemics in human history.

His fears were recorded by the Italian writer and poet Giovanni Boccaccio, who suffered the plague when it struck Florence. Disease, He wrote“It showed its first symptoms in men and women, sometimes in the groin or armpits, as bumps, some the size of an ordinary apple and some the size of an egg, and the people called them buboes. They came to be known as “signs of impending death.”

Historians have traced the epidemic – it apparently started in China or near China’s western border and moved along trade routes to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

But Monica H. Green, a medical historian and independent scientist The writer, who was not included in the new paper, noted that historians will never be able to answer the question they raise: Was it really Yersinia pestis that caused this huge pandemic?

“We hit the wall. We are historians and we are interested in documents,” he said.

He remembers very well meeting a paleopathologist working on leprosy 20 years ago who left visible marks on skeletons.

“When are you going to plague?” Doctor Green asked. He said the paleopathologist said they couldn’t study the plague because a disease that killed people so quickly left no traces on the bone.

Now this impasse has been overcome.

Not involved in the new study, Dr. Fissell said investigating the origin of the plague was “like a detective story.” “Now they have really good evidence of the crime scene.”

The hunt dates back more than a decade, when the group that led the latest study baffled archaeologists. their report He said they could find plague bacteria DNA in the teeth of the skeletons.

This study included plague victims in London.

Fourteenth-century Londoners knew the Black Death was coming, so they dedicated a cemetery in advance to prepare for their victims. The bodies were exhumed and are currently kept in the cemetery. London Museum. The situation was ideal because not only were these victims from a plague graveyard, but their date of death was also known.

Dr. “It’s excellent as an epidemiological case study,” Green said.

“The technical skill that went into this job was incredible,” he added.

Since the London study, the group has built a DNA family tree of plague bacterial variants by analyzing genetic material from plague victims in other regions. He and other researchers reported that the tree had a trunk and then suddenly split into four branches of Y. pestis strains whose lineages are now found in rodents. They named the event the Big Bang and began a quest to find out when and where it occurred.

Historians have proposed various dates from the 10th to the 14th centuries.

A later member of the group analyzing plague victims in Kyrgyzstan, Dr. Slavin said that one of his dreams was to solve the riddle of the origin of the Black Death.

“I was aware of two Christian cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan and started digging,” he said.

Surprisingly, he discovered that hundreds of tombstones were conclusively dated. Some had inscriptions in an ancient language, Syriac, saying that the person died of “the plague.” And the year these people died, the population death rate had soared.

Dr. “This caught my attention because it wasn’t just any year,” Slavin said. It was 1338, “just seven or eight years before the Black Death came to Europe.”

“We couldn’t ask for more than having tombstones with the year,” he said.

Researchers found plague DNA in the teeth of three people who said they died “of the plague” on their tombstones.

The group also reports that the rodents that spread the bacteria to these victims were the woodchuck. Marmots in that area today have fleas carrying a type of Y. pestis that appears to derive from a direct ancestral lineage.

And researchers report that the strain in Kyrgyzstan is from the trunk, which is divided into four strains. The group suggests that this is the beginning of the Big Bang.

Dr. If true, Fissell said that the Big Bang occurred just before the Black Death in Eurasia, and that the spread of the plague was most likely by trade routes, and not by military action in a century, as some historians have suggested. earlier.

Dr. Green and other historians have suggested when the Big Bang occurred: Mongols in the early 13th century spreading bacteria. But if that were the case, the bacteria in Kyrgyzstan would not be from the ancestors, but from one of the branches.

Dr. “These wars in the 1200s are pretty irrelevant,” Fissell said.

Dr. Green said he was convinced the group had found plague victims in Kyrgyzstan. But he said the evidence currently available is insufficient to justify his bold claims.

“Stay tuned,” said Dr. Green added that he hopes more evidence will emerge.

For now, he said, his detective work caught an important clue.

The study “puts a pin on the map with a date,” he added.