First of @PhysAnth's monthly webinars, on the evolution of health and history of human diseases.

#AAPAWebinars is the hashtag I think

First up is @monicaMedHist, a medical historian of the Middle Ages.
She's wanting to update us how genetics have changed how we study the Black Death.

Dr Green is already annoyed at how we treat the chronology and the geography as confined points, from 1347 starting in Europe.
This doesn't encompass where it came from or where it's gone to.

For example, we're in the Third Plague Pandemic, which, since the mid 19th-century, has killed millions around the world. 10 million in India alone have died, and outbreaks in Sydney caused ~1000 deaths. Even with antibiotics, fatality rate is about 11%.

Modern genetics studies are allowing us to look at how plague has evolved over time. Dr Green thinks this genetic data for the Black Death shows a pattern of *earlier* pandemic spread, by a century or more. This changes the implications of spread by quite a lot!

A century and a half earlier, we're now facing a major human movement event that changes culture, economy, and borders across Eurasia- the Mongolian invasion in the 1200s.

I'll direct everyone to @monicaMedHist, where she's posting a bibliography on state of the art research in this subject, but this interdisciplinary research is super exciting and I can't wait to see her paper (forthcoming)