A flea bites your ankle. Eight days later you are in a pit with
forty strangers. For six hundred years nobody could say where
the Black Death came from, and every textbook pointed at the
wrong country. Then seven sets of teeth from a cemetery in
Kyrgyzstan gave us the exact year it began.
This is the story of how the deadliest pandemic in human
history started, how a single gene turned a harmless bacterium
into a killer, and what it left behind in your own DNA.
Chapters:
0:00 Eight days from bite to grave
0:52 Everyone blamed the wrong country
1:07 The rat is innocent
1:48 The siege of Caffa
2:20 Twelve ships reach Sicily
2:38 What it does inside your body
3:36 467 gravestones in a mountain valley
4:57 The gene that changed everything
6:09 What the plague left in your cells
6:50 It never actually went away
Part two covers how humanity finally beat it, the doctor who
injected himself with plague, and the 2005 outbreak inside a
video game that epidemiologists studied as real data.
Sources:
Spyrou et al., “The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-
century central Eurasia”, Nature, 2022
Susat et al., “A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued
by Yersinia pestis”, Cell Reports, 2021
Klunk et al., “Evolution of immune genes is associated with the
Black Death”, Nature, 2022
CDC and WHO plague fact sheets
#history #blackdeath #plague #science
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