BLACK DEATH PLAGUE - Worst Pandemic In History - ORIGIN SOLVED WITH DNA FROM EARLY 14th CENTURY

Reueters Lifestyle Science Ancient DNA Solves Black Death Mystery 

Excerpt: Researchers said on Wednesday they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in Chu Valley near Lake Issyk Kul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339.  The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in  1346.

Interesting article!  (That's Central Asia in norther Kyrgystan.)

CORONA VIRUS PANDEMICS - DEATH RECORDS - GENEALOGY

Do you think you could stay at home for two weeks - possibly be alone the entire time - and keep busy?

I think I could.

I need time to organize my household, go through my closets, ready things for donation.

I can imagine catching up on my reading, watching movies I haven't yet, trying recipes I've been meaning to make. Writing letters or calling old friends I haven't had contact with in a while.  And of course there's always genealogy research and family history writing to continue.

Maybe you're sequestering yourself at the moment, or just staying home and out of crowds more than usual, and maybe you're reading this blog - ANCESTRY WORSHIP - GENEALOGY Blogspot to occupy your time.

I've been thinking about the term PANDEMIC and how diseases effected whole populations.  Like maybe all of you, my ancestors/ family have died of:

Tuberculosis

Cholera

Typhus 

The flu - as recently as 1955 and 1963 (Seeing the death records reminds me that taking the flu shot is a good idea.)

And perhaps most frightening - Small Pox.  As I understand it, you could catch it and go through horrible symptoms such as so much vomiting that you became completely dehydrated, resulting in organ failure.  There were also hideous weeping sores that left survivors with scars. A husband could give it to his wife who was nursing a newborn and all three would be dead in days.  A  feminine survivor in, say, colonial Philadelphia, might use pink colored wax - that contained led - to fill in the scars and give herself a smooth complexion.

I've seen the epidemics or pandemics in church records especially, when whole rows of people, young and old,  related or not, have the same reason for death listed. One after another.

An epidemic becomes a PANDEMIC when it effects a whole country or the world.

Pandemics have weened some DNA from populations.  There's some evidence that those who were more resistant may have even had changes in their DNA that they could pass on.  For instance the Black Death required thousands of burials and in those days before modern sanitation every opportunity to catch it and yet some survived.

The Black Death did something else to Europe.  People discarded class considerations in order to re-partner as a matter of survival.

And as there was more superstition than science at that point, people did not understand the role of filth.

I'm sure you are all listening to the news, watching YouTube videos, reading newspapers and on-line articles with the latest on this Wuhan Coronavirus.  Mixed in there is some speculation, some fake news (in both suggesting there is no problem and suggesting it's totally out of control.)

C 2020 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

BLACK DEATH CRACKED BY TEAM OF GERMAN CANADIAN AND AMERICAN SCIENTISTS

Kate Kelland of Reuters news service wrote this one and I'm linking to the Chicago Tribune article about it.

"The work, which involved extracting and purifying DNA from the remains of Black death victims buried in London's "plague pits," is the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen... Building on previous research which showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) bacterium was responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, a team of German, Canadian and American scientists went on to "capture" and sequence the entire genome of the disease... For this study Poinar's team analysed skeletal remains from Black Death victims buried in London's East Smithfield "plague pits," which are located under what is now the Royal Mint.By focusing on promising specimens from the dental pulp of five bodies, which had already been pre-screened for the presence of Y. pestis, they were able to extract, purify and enrich the disease's DNA and at the same time reduce the amount of background non-plague DNA which might interfere."

YOUR EUROPEAN ANCESTORS WERE PROBABLY SURVIVORS OF THE BLACK DEATH

CHANCES ARE VERY GOOD, if you are from European ancestry, that your genes are survivors of the BLACK DEATH - The Plague. I just read a fascinating article in the travel section of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, a paper copy, about tourism to the OBERAMMERGAU area, for the purposes of the yearly passion play, which has been put on every 10 years since the town promised God it would do so, if it were spared the Black Death.


According to SUSAN SPANO, the journalist who wrote the article called IN THE ALPS, A SAVING GRACE, which appeared in the Sunday June 7th edition, "Before the first Passion was staged and the plague abated, almost 100 villagers -died, relatively few compared with southern Germany as a whole, where the BLACK DEATH killed more than a million people.