Complex Numbers

Like the Plague

The hated month of February begins. Appropriately enough, the random number generator pulled up a plague article.

     Scientists say they've solved a 700-year-old mystery: Where and when Black Death began  

And no, they didn't pinpoint the exact flea.

As the deadliest pandemic in recorded history – it killed an estimated 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353 — it's a question that has plagued scientists and historians for nearly 700 years.

...really, NPR? You're going to do that pun? Who do you think you are, the BBC?

Incidentally, other sources put the number of victims higher than 50 million. That would be a significant number of people today; at the time, it was likely over 10% of the world's human population.

Now, researchers say they've found the genetic ancestor of the Black Death, which still infects thousands of people each year.

Which is not what the headline implied.

New research, published this month in the journal Nature, provides biological evidence that places the ancestral origins of Black Death in Central Asia, in what is now modern-day Kyrgyzstan.

See what lack of vowels will do?

Oh, and by "this month" they mean when the article was published, back in June of last year.

What's more, the researchers find that the strain from this region "gave rise to the majority of [modern plague] strains circulating in the world today," says Phil Slavin, co-author on the paper and a historian at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

One could ask where that strain came from in turn.

The article goes on to explain the various strands of evidence that led them to this conclusion, and it was apparently a multidisciplinary effort. That's the part I find interesting.

Does this mean that the mystery of the origin of Black Death has been solved?

"I would be very cautious about stretching it that far," says Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the McMaster University Ancient DNA Center in Ontario, Canada, who was not involved in the study. "Pinpointing a date and a specific site for emergence is a nebulous thing to do."

I'm just including this because I didn't want anyone to get the impression it's settled science, as the headline might make one believe.

When the Black Death swept across Eurasia, no one had the slightest clue what DNA was. Or a cell. Or hell, even the notion that organisms too small to see could be what caused the plague. No, they thought it was God's punishment, or witches' curses, or a comet or some shit like that.

I'm just throwing that out there because I continue to see romanticization of the past. While today sucks, the past sucked worse.