Latest news with #GreatPlague
CTV News
7 days ago
- Health
- CTV News
A plague mysteriously spread from Europe into Asia 4,000 years ago. Scientists now think they may know how
The Great Plague of London in 1665, depicted here, was found to be caused by Yersinia pestis. Universalvia CNN Newsource For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze Age, however, the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, had not yet developed the genetic tool kit that would allow later strains to be spread by fleas. Scientists have been baffled as to how the illness could have persisted at that time. Now, an international team of researchers has recovered the first ancient Yersinia pestis genome from a nonhuman host — a Bronze Age domesticated sheep that lived around 4,000 years ago in what is now modern-day Russia. The discovery has allowed the scientists to better understand the transmission and ecology of the disease in the ancient past, leading them to believe that livestock played a role in its spread throughout Eurasia. The findings were published Monday in the journal Cell. 'Yersinia pestis is a zoonotic disease (transmitted between humans and animals) that emerged during prehistory, but so far the way that we have studied it using ancient DNA has been completely from human remains, which left us with a lot of questions and few answers about how humans were getting infected,' said lead author Ian Light-Maka, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. There have been nearly 200 Y. pestis genomes recovered from ancient humans, the researchers wrote. Finding the ancient bacterium in an animal not only helps researchers understand how the bacterial lineage evolved, but it could also have implications for understanding modern diseases, Light-Maka added via email. 'Evolution can sometimes be 'lazy,' finding the same type of solution independently for a similar problem — the genetic tools that worked for pestis to thrive for over 2000 years across over Eurasia might be reused again.' Unraveling the mystery of a Bronze Age plague plague Excavations on the Eurasian Steppe have yielded thousands of animal bones from Bronze Age livestock. Courtesy Taylor Hermes via CNN Newsource The ancient bacterium that caused the Eurasia plague, known today as the Late Neolithic Bronze Age lineage, spread from Europe all the way to Mongolia, with evidence of the disease found across 6,000 kilometres (3,700 miles). Recent evidence suggests that the majority of modern human diseases emerged within the last 10,000 years and coincided with the domestication of animals such as livestock and pets, according to a release from the German research institute. Scientists suspected that animals other than rodents were a part of the enormous puzzle of the Bronze Age plague transmission, but without any bacterial genomes recovered from animal hosts, it was not clear which ones. To find the ancient plague genome, the study authors investigated Bronze Age animal remains from an archaeological site in Russia known as Arkaim. The settlement was once associated with a culture called Sintashta-Petrovka, known for its innovations in livestock. There, the researchers discovered the missing connection — the tooth of a 4,000-year-old sheep that was infected with the same plague bacteria found in humans from that area. Finding infected livestock suggests that the domesticated sheep served as a bridge between the humans and infected wild animals, said Dr. Taylor Hermes, a study coauthor and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. 'We're sort of unveiling this in real time and trying to get a sense for how Bronze Age nomadic herders out in the Eurasian Steppe were setting the stage for disease transmission that potentially led to impacts elsewhere,' Hermes said, 'not only in later in time, but also in a much more distant, distant landscape.' During this time within the Eurasian Steppe, as many as 20% of the bodies in some cemeteries are those of people who were infected with, and most likely died from, the plague, making it an extremely pervasive disease, Hermes said. While livestock are seemingly a part of what made the disease so widespread, they are only one piece of the puzzle. The identification of the bacterial lineage in an animal opens new avenues for researching this disease's evolution as well as the later lineage that caused the Black Death in Europe and the plague that's still around today, he added. plague The Y. pestis genome was recovered from this 4,000 year old sheep tooth. Courtesy Taylor Hermes via CNN Newsource 'It's not surprising, but it is VERY cool to see (the DNA) isolated from an ancient animal. It's extremely difficult to find it in humans and even more so in animal remains, so this is really interesting and significant,' Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary geneticist and director of the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in an email. Poinar was not involved with the study. It is likely that humans and animals were passing the strains back and forth, but it isn't clear how they did so — or how sheep were infected in the first place. It is possible sheep picked up the bacteria through a food or water source and then transmitted the disease to humans via the animal's contaminated meat, he added. 'I think it shows how extremely successful (if you want to label it that way) this particular pathogen has been,' Poinar added. He, as well as the study's authors, said they hope that further research uncovers other animals infected with the ancient strain to further the understanding of the disease's spread and evolution. Ancient plague to modern plague While the plague lineage that persisted during the Bronze Age is extinct, Yersinia pestis is still around in parts of Africa and Asia as well as the western United States, Brazil and Peru. But it's rare to encounter the bacteria, with only 1,000 to 2,000 cases of plague annually worldwide. There is no need for alarm when it comes to dealing with livestock and pets, Hermes said. The findings are a reminder that animals carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. Be cautious when cooking meat, or to take care when bitten by an animal, he added. 'The takeaway is that humans aren't alone in disease, and this has been true for thousands of years. The ways we are drastically changing our environment and how wild and domesticated animals are connected to us have the potential to change how disease can come into our communities,' Light-Maka said. 'And if you see a dead prairie dog, maybe don't go and touch it.'
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews: The Great Plague with Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman: Moralising TV presenters spoiled this absorbing look at plague-hit London
The Great Plague With Rob Rinder & Ruth Goodman Hard to credit, but the lockdown imposed on London during the Great Plague of 1665 was better organised and devised with more common sense than our own Covid shambles. Here was an England without sewers, or antibiotics, where disease was so little understood that some people suspected plague was transmitted in bread. Yet the Lord Mayor had the good judgment to order restrictions so that everyone was allowed to go outside at some point, whether or not their house was under quarantine. The healthy went about as usual, but obeyed a curfew in the evening so that other people living with plague victims could escape their four walls for an hour or two. Contrast that to the draconian, nonsensical rules forced on Britain during the pandemic, when nobody was allowed out at all except for essential reasons — and anyone living with a Covid patient was obliged to self-isolate rigorously for ten days. Rob Rinder and Ruth Goodman offered no comparison of the differing rules between the 17th and 21st centuries, in The Great Plague. They had another modern concern: the inequalities between rich and poor. TV historians love to inflict today's morals on our ancestors, whether that's castigating them for the evils of empire or bewailing the treatment of criminals. Rob and Ruth were thoroughly disapproving of the wealth gap in Restoration England. In fact, most people would have seen the very notion of redistributing wealth through taxes and welfare as wicked. The gulf between social classes was something ordained by God, they believed: 'The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate,' as the hymn has it. It's a pity that this unhistorical attitude pervaded the programme, because it spoiled an absorbing depiction of how plague decimated London. The dressing-up box was well used, especially by Rob, who enjoyed himself enormously as a pampered gentleman. Jealous lover of the night: Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse) fretted as his mistress Diana (Joanna Vanderham) planned an opera date with Hitler, in Outrageous (U&Drama). 'Just the two of you?' he demanded. 'Oh,' she purred, 'I'm sure there'll be some bodyguards around.' Posing as 'confirmed bachelor' Sir William Turner, a benefactor to the poor, he donned a periwig and embroidered waistcoat to go riding in a sedan chair. 'Servant!' he commanded, 'Maid! Shut the door!' Secretly, Rob would love to be a Disney villain. He did try to show a more humane side, though: 'I've got some leftover food for you later,' he promised a serving wench. Ruth, who is never happier than when knee-deep in the muck of Tudor and Stuart days, practised walking in pattens, the wooden clogs worn when walking through the slurry on London's streets. This was all entertaining, though more attention could have been paid to the detail of the script. Rob opened by explaining they would be, 'diving into 1665, when a killer virus . . . left the city fighting for its life'. In fact, as was later made clear, plague was caused not by a virus but a bacterium, Yersinia pestis.
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The Black Death didn't destroy Britain
After the devastation of the Great Plague came a wave of prosperity and innovation, not to mention the birth of the middle class
The Mainichi
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan: Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon - the ultimate love match
A few weeks ago, I attended a rather unusual concert in Cambridge, England. All the pieces of music dated from the time of the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). My knowledge of the pop songs of the 1660s is not what it should be and I didn't have a particular strong conception of what music from this period actually sounds like. We are talking here about going back to a time before virtually all the famous classical composers -- before Beethoven, before Mozart, even before Bach. As it turns out however, the music of the 17th century gets on perfectly well without all of them and is teeming with beautiful pieces and charming songs played to the accompaniment of the strangest of instruments. We started off with some songs played on the spinet, a kind of early harpsichord, and then the musicians produced an extraordinary instrument called a "theorbo," which is an extravagantly oversized lute. Pepys himself loved music and probably owned the very spinet on which the songs were performed, and ordered the making of a "theorbo" which he proudly declared in his diary to be as good as any in the country. When not writing his diary or helping to run the British admiralty (his day job), he even composed songs himself. Of late, I've found myself getting more and more interested in Pepys and his world. Years ago, I listened to actor and director Kenneth Branagh reading extracts from the voluminous diary (which covers the years 1660-69) and recently I've been reading Claire Tomalin's prize-winning biography of Pepys, "The Unequalled Self". What is fascinating about Pepys is partly the turbulence of the time he lived -- the nine years of the diary cover the chaos and anxiety in England following the death of Oliver Cromwell, the initially jubilant restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the war against the Dutch amongst many other happenings. But amidst all these mammoth events, there is the even greater fascination of being immersed in the domestic minutiae of Pepys' daily life, sharing with him his passions and disappointments, his surreptitious affairs and ambitions, his bowel movements and flatulations, his moments of anger, grief and joy. Tomalin recounts that Pepys was an astoundingly good diarist because for him every day of life was an adventure in human consciousness, filled with the sheer thrill of being alive, of being able to sense and enjoy everything the world had to offer -- its food, its music, its voluptuous women, its poetry, its conversation and company, its seasons and heats and frosts, and, not least, his cherished books. All these things were part of his all-consuming embrace of life that makes him a thrilling literary companion. These days, if I feel like disappearing for a while into an alternate universe, then I might turn to Pepys and transport myself back into the 1660s. Yet Pepys is not the only explorer of consciousness that I have turned to of late. On recent trips to Japan I wanted to introduce my two daughters to a writer who might capture their interest and so began listening with them to a reading (in English) of "The Pillow Book" by Sei Shonagon. As we had our breakfasts every morning in Japan, we would be transported to Sei Shonagon's world of the Imperial Court in Kyoto around the year 1,000 where Shonagon was a courtier. We would enjoy her sometimes caustic and always beautiful observations on the men and women around her, the changing colours of the mountains, the preferred etiquette of her lovers, the seasonal colours of the mountains, the sound of the flute in the night air... I must admit that I am a fairly recent covert to Sei Shonagon. In my younger days, I had a far greater appreciation of Shonagon's contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the monumental "The Tale of Genji". Shonagon seemed to me much the inferior of the two. But rediscovering "The Pillow Book" with my daughters, I now see that Shonagon is a much more fascinating, individualistic personality than I first appreciated. She is never less than her own woman and, like Pepys, is an admirably honest and perceptive contemplator of the sights, sounds and flavours of her own existence. Unlike Pepys, she was not keeping a day-to-day journal, but rather a compendium of observations on diverse subjects that cumulatively add up to an almost cubist portrait of a world now vastly lost in time. Sitting in an autumnal chapel in Cambridge, England, listening to the music of the 1660s, I found myself strangely thinking about Sei Shonagon and about how fundamentally similar she and Samuel Pepys were. In their professional lives, they were robust and worldly, but in their private lives they were seekers of (sometimes illicit) joy and things of beauty, candid in their assessments of themselves and others. I was thinking that this strange linkage of Samuel Pepys and Sei Shonagon was a whimsical idea all my own, when my daughter surprised me at breakfast the next morning by suddenly saying, "Last night I dreamt of Sei Shonagon and Samuel Pepys..." When I responded that I had been thinking about them too and that they would have made a great couple, my 14-year-old daughter recoiled in distaste at the idea. "Ugh!" And yet I'm still thinking it could have been a match made in heaven, or in hell, to put two such quick-witted, intelligent and highly opinionated minds together. We live in a world in which, to a tiresome degree, people are compartmentalised according to their nation, their race, their gender, their sexuality. Yet sometimes, people from vastly different cultures at completely different historical periods can appear profoundly similar in their thrilling engagement with the sheer mystery of being alive. We make a mistake, I suspect, when we keep Sei Shonagon cloistered in a room called "Heian Court Literature", alongside (to her probably insufferable) companions like Murasaki Shikibu. Pepys himself, I suspect, would have found boundless joy in the colours and beauty of the Heian court, stealing through the nighttime garden of a Heian lady, intent on begging entrance for a moonlit tryst. While Sei Shonagon longs, I think, to burst into a wider world, to explore Pepys' library of Western books, to smoke a pipe and drink some wine, and sing songs of love while Samuel flirtatiously accompanies her on the theorbo. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 59 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
