Untersuchungen haben das erste Massengrab im Mittelmeerraum der weltweit frühesten aufgezeichneten Pandemie bestätigt und liefern völlig neue Details über die Pest von Justinian, die zwischen dem 6. und 8. Jahrhundert im Byzantinischen Reich Millionen Menschen tötete.

A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world’s 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’s 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.

DNA taken from bodies at a mass burial ground at Jerash in modern-day Jordan show the grave represented “a single mortuary event”, instead of the normal, gradual growth over time of a traditional cemetery, according to the team that last year identified Yersinia pestis as the microbe that caused the plague.

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.

“Earlier 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,” said Rays Jiang, the study’s lead author and associate professor in the University of South Florida’s department of global, environmental and genomic health sciences.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440326000038#preview-section-abstract