New Article: The Birth of the Black Death

Project co-investigator Phil Slavin has published an article titled “The Birth of the Black Death: Biology, Climate, Environment, and the Beginnings of the Second Plague Pandemic in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia” in Environmental History.

The article considers the environmental context of the early fourteenth-century Tian Shan region, in which the Second Plague Pandemic in general and the Black Death in particular commenced. It suggests that this major evolutionary event may have started in the context of profound eco-biological and climatic shifts, triggering bacterial activity (i.e., Yersia pestis infection, transmission, and dissemination capacity) and initiating what became the single harshest human killer in known history. In particular, the article underscores how landscape change, weather conditions, and seismic activity in that region prepared the ground for the beginning and early spread of the plague pandemic.