\n<\/p>\n
A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world\u2019s earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries.<\/p>\n
The findings, published in February\u2019s Journal of Archaeological Science, offer what researchers say is a rare empirical window into the mobility, urban life and vulnerability of citizens affected by the pestilence.<\/p>\n
DNA taken from bodies at a mass burial ground at Jerash in modern-day Jordan show the grave represented \u201ca single mortuary event\u201d, instead of the normal, gradual growth over time of a traditional cemetery, according to the team that last year identified Yersinia pestis<\/em> as the microbe that caused the plague.<\/p>\n The new research focused on the victims, how they lived, their susceptibility to the disease and why they were in Jerash, a regional trade hub and the epicenter of the pandemic that raged from AD541 to AD750.<\/p>\n \u201cEarlier stories identified the plague organism. The Jerash site turns that genetic signal into a human story about who died, and how a city experienced crisis,\u201d said Rays Jiang, the study\u2019s lead author and associate professor in the University of South Florida\u2019s department of global, environmental and genomic health sciences.<\/p>\n <\/span>A tooth from the site in Jerash.<\/span> Photograph: Greg O\u2019Corry\/FAU-Crowe<\/p>\n \u201cPandemics aren\u2019t just biological events, they\u2019re social events. By linking biological evidence from the bodies to the archaeological setting, we can see how disease affected real people within their social and environmental context.<\/p>\n \u201cThis helps us understand pandemics in history as lived human health events, not just outbreaks recorded in text.\u201d<\/p>\n A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, historians and genetic experts from the University of South Florida, Florida Atlantic University and the University of Sydney produced the paper, with Jiang and her researchers looking at DNA extracted from teeth.<\/p>\n They found that a diverse demographic range of victims, which she said showed that a largely mobile population was together and effectively stuck in the same place by the disease, similar to how travel shut down during the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople move. They\u2019re transient, and vulnerable, and normally they are disturbed, dispersed. Here, they were brought together by crisis,\u201d Jiang said, adding that ancient pandemics thrived in densely populated cities shaped by travel and environmental change.<\/p>\n <\/span>Rays Jiang of the University of South Florida College of Public Health.<\/span> Photograph: Torie Doll\/University of South Florida<\/p>\n Excavations revealed more than 200 people were buried in the grave at the hippodrome in Jerash, known as the Pompeii of the Middle East for its preserved Greco-Roman ruins. Jiang said they were a mix of men and women, old and young, \u201cpeople in their prime, and teenagers\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAt that time there were slaves, mercenaries, all sorts of people, and our data is consistent with this being a transient population. That\u2019s not a new thing,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n Jiang said the research exposed other parallels in more modern pandemics, particularly Covid, dismissed by Donald Trump in its early days as \u201ca hoax\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a whole school of thought that says the first pandemic did not happen,\u201d she said. \u201cThe denialists argue that if you look at census data, the population did not collapse like the Black Death, if you look at economic tracking, you don\u2019t see anything, if you study residence density maps you don\u2019t see a disruption. And plus, no one had found a mass grave.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the first plague is actually much easier to untangle than Covid. We have Yersinia pestis<\/em> as the microbe; we have a mass grave, and bodies, hard evidence that it happened. Whether society or institutions collapsed is a separate matter. You can have a disease rampage through and don\u2019t have to have a revolution, a revolt, a regime change to prove that it did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world\u2019s earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries. The findings, published in February\u2019s Journal of Archaeological Science, offer what researchers say is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[737,19650,9728,4535,13362,2725,1472,1716,16200,22152,4742],"class_list":{"0":"post-43333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-diseases","9":"tag-earliest","10":"tag-grave","11":"tag-infectious","12":"tag-jordan","13":"tag-light","14":"tag-mass","15":"tag-pandemic","16":"tag-recorded","17":"tag-sheds","18":"tag-worlds"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/43334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}