Plague repeatedly swept across Eurasia for centuries, then vanished from Europe and the Middle East—and no one fully understands why. This project brings together climate scientists, historians, biologists, and epidemiologists to reconstruct the precise combination of environmental, biological, and social conditions that allowed plague to re-emerge in Central Asia, radiate across the continent, and eventually disappear. The researchers will analyse tree rings, ancient soil chemistry, historical documents, and ancient DNA from human and rodent remains, then feed that data into mathematical models to test how climate shifts, rodent ecology, trade routes, and human immunity interacted to drive outbreaks. If successful, the work will transform understanding of a disease that shaped human history. It will also provide a concrete framework for predicting how future epidemic diseases might emerge from wildlife reservoirs under changing environmental and social conditions. This is fundamental science with direct relevance to pandemic preparedness: understanding the past mechanics of plague outbreaks sharpens the ability to spot the conditions that could trigger new ones.
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Synergy-Plague is a multi-disciplinary project to bring our knowledge and understanding of plague, past and present, to new heights. Focussing on the environmental, biological, and societal aspects of plague outbreaks in Eurasia between circa 1300 and 1900 CE, it will address four main questions: (1) Why/how did plague re-emerge in 14th century Central Asia? (2) Why/how did plague re-occur and spread in Eurasia after the Black Death? (3) Why/how did clinical and demographic patterns of plague infection differ across space and time? (4) Why/how did plague disappear from Europe and the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries? Our project is based on the hypothesis that plague waves and clinical differences resulted from unique alignments of multiple events: environmental (climatic and soil-chemical), biological (from individual to ecosystem) and societal (demographic, socio-economic and political). Four PIs from the natural sciences and humanities, together with their team members, will jointly study how plague re-emerged in 14th century Central Asia and radiated repeatedly from Eurasian wildlife reservoirs in the following centuries, only to disappear in the 18th -19th centuries. We will develop and analyse new dendrochronological and (paleo-)soil data, textual documentary evidence, and epidemiological models. To understand how plague reached and spread in human populations, paleo-environmental and historical data together with relevant experimental work will be combined with statistical and mathematical modelling. To appreciate why clinical signs and mortality rates varied in space and time, historical evidence will be examined together with new entomological data and ancient DNA (aDNA) of historical plague strains (from humans and anthropophilic rodents). Synergy-Plague will revolutionise our understanding of plague and contribute to our ongoing struggle with epidemic diseases, present and future
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