The emergence and spread of infectious diseases with pandemic potential occurred
regularly throughout history. Major pandemics and epidemics such as plague, cholera, flu …

SUMMARY The Gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis is responsible for deadly plague, a
zoonotic disease established in stable foci in the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. Its …

Europe's recent summer droughts have had devastating ecological and economic
consequences, but the severity and cause of these extremes remain unclear. Here we …

The origin of the medieval Black Death pandemic (ad 1346–1353) has been a topic of
continuous investigation because of the pandemic's extensive demographic impact and long …

Climatic changes during the first half of the Common Era have been suggested to play a role
in societal reorganizations in Europe, and Asia,. In particular, the sixth century coincides with …

Plague is a vector-borne disease caused by Yersinia pestis. Transmitted by fleas from
rodent reservoirs, Y. pestis emerged< 6000 years ago from an enteric bacterial ancestor …

In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes
in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange …

Over the past decade, a genomics revolution, made possible through the development of
high-throughput sequencing, has triggered considerable progress in the study of ancient …

This article provides an overview of recent literature on plagues and other lethal epidemics,
covering the period from late Antiquity to ca. 1800. We analyze the main environmental and …

The first historically documented pandemic caused by Yersinia pestis began as the
Justinianic Plague in 541 within the Roman Empire and continued as the so-called First …