In a valley in Central Asia, gravestones from 1338 and 1339 carry the same word again and again: pestilence. Out of 467 dated stones, 118 belong to just those two years. Almost seven centuries later, the teeth of the people buried there answered a question historians had argued about for generations: where did the Black Death begin?
This is the investigation behind that answer. The legend of plague-infected bodies thrown over the walls of Caffa, and who actually recorded it. The twelve galleys that reached Sicily. Whether rats really spread the Great Mortality. The London teeth that finally named the killer. And the bacterial family tree that led researchers back to a cemetery near Lake Issyk-Kul.
What the evidence proves, what it only suggests, and what is still argued today.
Chapters:
0:00 The Stone Cutter
1:21 A World Connected
3:01 The Siege of Caffa
4:44 Twelve Galleys
6:32 The Great Mortality
8:24 Don’t Blame the Rats
10:04 The Teeth of London
11:57 The Big Bang
14:09 The Word on the Stones
16:24 What the Plague Left Behind
Sources:
• The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04800-3
• Black Death: how we solved the centuries-old mystery of its origins (Philip Slavin) — https://theconversation.com/black-death-how-we-solved-the-centuries-old-mystery-of-its-origins-185423
• From the Tian Shan to Crimea: Dynamics of Plague Spread during the Early Stages of the Black Death, 1338–46 (Slavin, texto do autor) — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372011573_From_the_Tian_Shan_to_Crimea_Dynamics_of_Plague_Spread_during_the_Early_Stages_of_the_Black_Death_1338-46
• 675-year-old mystery ends after researchers discover the origins of the Black Death (University of Stirling) — https://www.stir.ac.uk/news/2022/june-2022-news/675-year-old-mystery-ends-after-researchers-discover-the-origins-of-the-black-death/
• Ursprung des Schwarzen Todes identifiziert (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) — https://www.mpg.de/18797697/ursprung-des-schwarzen-todes-identifiziert
• Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa (Wheelis, Emerging Infectious Diseases) — https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article
• Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain Embargoes and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–48 (Slavin, Speculum) — https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/711596
• La peste del 1348: Michele da Piazza (edição de fonte, Università di Napoli) — https://www.rm.unina.it/didattica/fonti/anto_bme/cap_XVII/XVII_2.htm
• Bioarchaeological evidence for Black women in 14th-century London (London Museum) — https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/bioarchaeological-evidence-for-black-women-in-14th-century-london/
• Human ectoparasites and the spread of plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic (Dean et al., PNAS) — https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1715640115
• A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death (Bos et al., Nature) — https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10549
• Evolution of immune genes is associated with the Black Death (Klunk et al., Nature) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05349-x
• Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death (Barton et al., Nature) — https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08496-5
• Reply to: Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08497-4
Narration: AI voice. Illustrations: AI-generated reconstructions of places and moments no camera recorded; the stone cutter in the opening is imagined, the inscriptions and dates are documented. No real person is depicted.
#BlackDeath #History #Documentary
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