Humans Spread The Black Death – Not Rats – Scientists Say

AncientPages.com - The Black Death is one of the most devastating plagues in human history.

The Black Death, started in the Gobi Desert as a minor disease known as Yersinia Pestis. It first entered the country at Melcombe Regis, what is now Weymouth, a seaside town in Dorset, England. On June 24, 1348, the terrible Black Death arrived in Britain.

Detail from an engraving depicting plague victims in Leiden, the Netherlands, in 1574.

It is estimated this horrifying plague claimed the lives of tens of millions. Between 1347 and 1351 as many as 25 million people died in Europe. That's more than a third of Europe's population!

It has long been assumed that rats spread the plague. However, a new study reveals the main carriers of fleas and lice that spread the plague were in fact humans.

See also:

Black Death Arrived In Britain – On June 24, 1348

Using mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe, scientists from the University of Oslo,Noway have constructed models of the disease dynamics in those cities. Researchers examined three possible models for infection: rats, airborne transmission, and fleas and ticks that humans carry around with them on their bodies and clothes.

 A plague doctor was a medical physician who treated victims of the plague. Copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel (i.e., Dr. Beak), a plague doctor in seventeenth-century Rome, circa 1656. Credit: Wikipedia

“It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats,” Nils Stenseth, a professor at the University of Oslo and co-author of Monday’s study, told BBC News. “It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person.”

How and why rats were blamed for the spreading of the Black Death is still unknown. According to scientists “there is little historical and archaeological support for such a claim.”

it's important to remember that if rats were a main cause of the plague, there would be more archaeological evidence of dead rats and this is not the case.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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