Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsIn 1346, Tartar leader Khan Janibeg laid siege to a Genoese city in Crimea called Kaffa in hopes of removing the Italians from this central foothold. What happened next has become: As the Tartars waited outside Kaffa’s walls, the soldiers began to fall one by one to a terrible disease, the plague.
Out of frustration, the Tartar leaders catapulted the disease-ridden bodies over the walls of the city, where the residents threw the bodies aside and fled in ships back to Italy. But the plague followed them to Sicily and spread throughout Europe, killing 30 to 50 percent of the population by 1351.
Using a “clean room,” the researchers drilled into the teeth of the three, into their dental pulp, aka the tooth’s innermost layer containing blood vessels. In the fossilized tissue, they found DNA remnants of