The origin of mankind's worst pandemic

Its origins are in the Tian Shan (modern - day Kyrgyzstan), Central Asia, in the first half of the 20th century. The study, published in the magazine “Nature”, says that the Black Plague reached the Mediterranean in the middle of the XIV by commercial ships traveling the Silk Road from the Black Sea and spread across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in a large - scale explosion.

The Black Plague, which lasted as a pandemic until the beginning of the 20th century, killed more than half of the European population.

Philip Slavin, a historian of the environmental economy by Stirling (United Kingdom) and lead author of the study, found high death records in several cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan for 1338 and 1339. The study suggests that at one point in the XIV century, there was an event that researchers call “Big Bang”, a massive diversification of plague species, which they link to the generation of the first great Black Death wave in Europe, between 1346 and 1353.

Many theories established the origin of this pandemic in countries of Asia such as China or Mongolia, but in this study, researchers indicated that the initial explosion occurred in this Central Asian region, an area covered by important trade routes in the Middle Ages. Scientists concluded that the ancient type of Central Asia that caused the plague epidemic of 1338-1339 in Kyrgyzstan passed on to people from marmots in the region. /A2 CNN