Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic

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Authors

IZDEBSKI Adam GUZOWSKI Piotr PONIAT Radosław MASCI Lucrezia PALLI Jordan VIGNOLA Cristiano BAUCH Martin COCOZZA Carlo NEVES FERNANDES Luis Ricardo LJUNGQVIST Fredrik Charpentier NEWFIELD Timothy SEIM Andrea ABEL-SCHAAD Daniel ALBA-SANCHEZ Francisca Alba BJOERKMAN Leif BRAUER Achim BROWN Alex CZERWINSKI Sambor EJARQUE Ana FIŁOC Magdalena FLORENZANO Assunta FREDH Erik Daniel FYFE Ralph JASIUNAS Nauris KOŁACZEK Piotr KOULI Katerina KOZAKOVÁ Radka KUPRYJANOWICZ Mirosława LAGERAS Per LAMENTOWICZ Mariusz LINDBLADH Matts LOPEZ-SAEZ José Antonio LUELMO-LAUTENSCHLAEGER María de los Reyes MARCISZ Katarzyna MAZIER Florence MENSING Scott MERCURI Anna Maria MILECKA Krystyna MIRAS Yannick NORYSKIEWICZ Agnieszka Maria NOVENKO Elena OBREMSKA Milena PANAJIOTIDIS Sampson PAPADOPOULOU Maria PEDZISZEWSKA Anna PEREZ-DIAZ Sebastián PIOVESAN Gianluca PLUSKOWSKI Aleks POKORNÝ Petr POSKA Anneli REITALU Triin RÖSCH Manfred SADORI Laura SÁ FERREIRA Carla SEBAG David SŁOWIŃSKI Michał STANCIKAITE Migle STIVRINS Normunds TUNNO Irene VESKI Siim WACNIK Agnieszka MASI Alessia

Year of publication 2022
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source NATURE ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01652-4
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01652-4
Keywords The Black Death; plague; pandemic; palaeoecology; DNA research
Description The Black Death (1347–1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.
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