Ulf Büntgen

How do we know about anything about bacteria in the 14th century?

What if it was a different disease?

So there was a lot of debate about that.

And so they were able to collect teeth from the cemetery in London and test the teeth, and they found a lot of Yersinia pestis.

And so that was kind of the convincing evidence that this is a plague outbreak.

It is not other diseases.

It is specifically plague.

We can be looking at other kinds of rodents.

We can look at other kinds of mammals.

Camels, it turns out, are pretty good plague transmitters.

Camels?

Sheep, potentially, as well.

And the same thing, it seems, is true with the insects.

So there's this particular species of flea that is associated with the rats.

That is kind of the go-to explanation, but there are other types of fleas, possibly also lice.

On the biological side, this is one of the areas of investigation, is what other insects, what other rodents or mammals are potential carriers of the disease?

How long it took and what routes it took to move into the Middle East, into the area that's now southern Russia, the steppe, and then into Europe.

That is an open question right now.

That's an area of current research.

It can be called the Golden Horde.