March 12, 2025听 听 听2:30-4:00pm
, Independent Scholar听听
How Genetics Has Changed the History of the Black Death,听And How History Has Changed Genetics
In 2011, four nearly complete genomes of Yersinia pestis were retrieved from two fourteenth-century London cemeteries. In the fourteen years since then, about 100 genomes of Y. pestis have been retrieved from Second Plague Pandemic sites in Central and western Eurasia. Thus far, their evolutionary relationships tell a consistent story: that one single lineage of Y. pestis was carried westward in the thirteenth century, most likely from a marmot reservoir in or near the Tian Shan mountain range separating present-day China from Kyrgyzstan.
That鈥檚 the story from genetics. The story from historical sources is only now beginning to be pieced together, because historians are only now learning how to take information coming from the genetic and ecological sciences of plague and apply it to the testimony created by human actors in the pre-microscopic era. That new cross-interrogation has pushed back the history of the pandemic by a century, and complicated assumptions that have driven evolutionary genetics. This talk will present what is currently known of the origins and transmission of the zoonotic disease of plague, documenting hitherto unperceived outbreaks that led up to the disease鈥檚 explosive proliferation in the mid-fourteenth century and its persistence in Afro-Eurasia up to the present day.
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Past Speakers
Scott Podolsky, Harvard University, 13 March 2024
Nahyan Fancy, de Pauw University,听15 March 2023
Kirsten Ostherr, Rice University, 20 March 2022
Michael Stolberg, Institute for the History of Medicine, W眉rzburg, Germany, 1 April 2020
Sunil Amrith, Harvard University, 28 March 2019
Emma Spary, Cambridge University,听23 November 2016
Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University, 18听March 2015
Michael Hagner, ETH Zurich, 10 February 2012
Mike Harrington, Harvard University, 1 March 2010
Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, 30 March 2009
Allan Brandt, Harvard University, 5 March 2008
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