Believed to have originally come to Europe from Asia via the Silk Road trading route, it was thought that the repeated plague outbreaks that followed the Black Death epidemic were caused by rodent ...

Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as ...

OSLO, NORWAY—Christian Stenseth of the University of Oslo and his team have examined tree-ring records from Europe and compared that information with more than 7,000 historical outbreaks of the ...

The Black Death takes the Silk Road Another key part of the story is that this region of Kyrgyzstan was a stopover on the Silk Road trading route that extended from China to western Europe.

Ironically, the Black Death was also the undoing of the mighty Mongol Empire. It cleared legions of Mongol population from Russia to China and enabled the Turkmeni to seize power around the Silk Road.

Making its way westward via Silk Road merchants and caravans, the plague took several years to reach Persia, where it killed the Khan overlord Abu Said as well as half the population. In 1347, it ...

Despite surviving, and sometimes thriving, during times of trouble, the Silk Road trade started to deteriorate by about A.D. 1360. Already drained by the bursts of the bubonic plague during the Black ...

The Black Death: what was it, how ... Kyrgyzstan, is thought to have jumped into a community of Christian traders "who then spread the disease via the Silk Road". It arrived on the British Isles ...

In the 14th century, the Black Death broke out along the Silk Road, the trade route between modern China and Europe, killing about 50 million people in Europe, ...

Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story. IT WASN’T the rats after all. Cute little gerbils, not their much-despised cousins, may have caused the Black ...