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What evidence links Yersinia pestis to the Black Death?
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plague
Image depicting victims of the sixth biblical plague.
The link between Yersinia pestis and the Black Death is established through modern scientific analysis of historical remains. While the nature of the Black Death was poorly understood at the time, the introduction of DNA-based approaches has allowed researchers to detect the genetic material of Y. pestis in tissue specimens recovered from archaeological sites in Europe, where the plague was a major cause of death between the 6th and 17th centuries.1
These findings provide definitive evidence that the bacterium, which was first isolated in 1894 by Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburo during a later pandemic, was indeed the causative agent of the 14th-century Black Death.12