Blurt!Commonplace Book

plague

“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that circulate in modern rodent populations.”

posted Sep. 25, 2022, 8:00pm

“‘If the Black Death caused the Renaissance will the COVID pandemic cause a golden age?’ You see the problems with the question now: the Black Death didn’t cause the Renaissance, not by itself, and the Renaissance was not a golden age, at least not the kind that you would want to live in, or to see your children live in.”

posted Aug. 26, 2022, 8:00pm