ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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23 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Comparative Analysis of Aging Across Causes of Death.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Ancient oaks reveal rewilding of Mediterranean forests after the Black Death.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Decadal-scale pollen records link land use and plant diversity change across European lowlands over seven millennia.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Assessing plague risk across seven decades of environmental change in Inner Mongolia, China: An interpretable machine learning.iScience · 2026Article
- Cultural innovation can increase and maintain biodiversity: A case study from medieval Europe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Childhood nutritional stress and later-life health outcomes in medieval England: Evidence from incremental dentine analysis.Science advances · 2025Article
- The spatial distribution of pertussis, but not measles or smallpox, in pre-industrial Finland matches dialects.iScience · 2025Article
- Ten simple rules to bridge ecology and palaeoecology by publishing outside palaeoecological journals.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Towards a Comprehensive Definition of Pandemics and Strategies for Prevention: A Historical Review and Future Perspectives.Microorganisms · 2024Review
- Human genetic structure in Northwest France provides new insights into West European historical demography.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Flea Burden on Rodents and Its Associated Determinants in Plague-Endemic Localities of Karatu District, Tanzania: A Cross-Sectional Study.Public health challenges · 2024Article
- Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- Uncovering the Holocene roots of contemporary disease-scapes: bringing archaeology into One Health.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- AncientProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Regional long-term analysis of dietary isotopes in Neolithic southeastern Italy: new patterns and research directions.Scientific reports · 2023Review
- Persistence of gender biases in Europe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Climate change, human health, and resilience in the Holocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Reduction in grain pollen indicates population decline, but not necessarily Black Death mortality.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
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Abstract
The Black Death (1347-1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe's population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic's causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, 'big data palaeoecology', which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death's mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death's mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.
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