14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that the Black Death did something more than just kill millions of people back in the 14th century. Thus, this pandemic is now said to have altered Europe's genetic pool.
In a paper published in yesterday's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers says that the descendants of survivors of the Black Death are likely to carry genetic marks that testify to their origin.
The scientists go on to detail that, after compiling and analyzing data concerning the genetic makeup of Roma people, otherwise known as gypsies, and white Europeans, they found that these two groups of people have certain alterations to their genetic code in common.
Interestingly enough, the Roma people did not have these alterations at the time when they arrive in Europe all the way from northwest India about a millennia ago.
What's more, reasons having to do with social status and economic background have kept these two groups of people from interbreeding to a considerable extent since they first became acquainted to one another until present day.
This means that said genetic alterations could not have simply traveled from one group to the other, and must have appeared as a result of the environmental conditions that both Roma people and white Europeans were exposed to at a given moment in time.
According to Live Science, the most likely candidate for the environment-induced convergent evolution between Roma people and white Europeans is the Black Death.
“We show that there are some immune receptors that are clearly influenced by evolution in Europe and not in northwest India,” study leader Mihai Netea with the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands told the publication.
“India did not have the medieval plague, as Europe had. We have also demonstrated that these receptors are recognizing Yersinia pestis, which is the plague bacterium,” the specialist went on to say.
As explained in yesterday's paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proof of the convergent evolution of Roma people and white Europeans sits in the makeup of some 20 genes.