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The Black Death
Know the investigations of researchers using genomic information to reconstruct the cause and transmission routes of the bubonic plague and the Black Death
Researchers using genomic information to trace the transmission routes in past epidemics of plague.

Plague is an ancient disease that was described during Classical times as occurring in North Africa and the Middle East. It is sometimes presumed to be the disease behind several historic epidemics, such as the pestilence described as striking the Philistines in the biblical book of 1 Samuel. Unequivocal evidence for its early existence comes from the discovery of genomic traces of Y. pestis in the teeth of Neolithic farmers in Sweden dated to roughly 4,900 years ago and from analyses of ancient DNA in the teeth of Bronze Age humans, which indicate that Y. pestis was present in Asia and Europe by between 3000 and 800 BCE. It is impossible, however, to verify the true nature of these early outbreaks.

The first great plague pandemic to be reliably reported occurred during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in the 6th century CE. According to the historian Procopius and others, the outbreak began in Egypt and moved along maritime trade routes, striking Constantinople in 542.

There it killed residents by the tens of thousands, the dead falling so quickly that authorities had trouble disposing of them. Judging by descriptions of the symptoms and mode of transmission of the disease, it is likely that all forms of plague were present. Over the next half-century, the pandemic spread westward to port cities of the Mediterranean and eastward into Persia. Christian writers such as John of Ephesus ascribed the plague to the wrath of God against a sinful world, but modern researchers conclude that it was spread by domestic rats, which traveled in seagoing vessels and proliferated in the crowded, unhygienic cities of the era.

The next great plague pandemic was the dreaded Black Death of Europe in the 14th century. The number of deaths was enormous, reaching two-thirds or three-fourths of the population in various parts of Europe. It has been calculated that one-fourth to one-third of the total population of Europe, or 25 million persons, died from plague during the Black Death.

For the next three centuries, outbreaks of plague occurred frequently throughout the continent and the British Isles.

The Great Plague of London of 1664–66 caused between 75,000 and 100,000...