An international team of scientists has shown that the plague pathogen has been around for 600 years.
Between 1348 and 1353, Black Death led to the death of a third of Europeans but it until recently, it wasn’t known whether the bacteria that causes the plague today (Yersinia pestis) was the same as the one that cased the deadly plague.
The University of Tübingen’s Institute of Scientific Archaeology and McMaster University in Canada have confirmed Yersinia pestis was behind the great plague and published in the results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists doubted that the pathogen for the Middle Ages plague and the modern plague was the same because the latter spreads more slowly and is less deadly, and samples with the medieval bacteria have previously been dismissed as being contaminated.
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