Black Death origin mystery solved after 675 years

A deadly pandemic with mysterious origins: it might sound like a modern headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the source of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world.

Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analysing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site.

"We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The Black Death was the initial wave of a nearly 500-year pandemic. In just eight years, from 1346 to 1353, it killed up to 60 percent of the population of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to estimates.

Slavin, an associate professor at the University of Stirling in Scotland who has "always been fascinated with the Black Death", found an intriguing clue in an 1890 work describing an ancient burial site in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan.

It reported a spike in burials in 1338-39 and that several tombstones described people having "died of pestilence".

"When you have one or two years with excess mortality it means that something funny was going on there," Slavin told reporters.

"But it wasn't just any year -- 1338 and 1339 was just seven or eight years before the Black Death."