A big challenge is how to translate the genetic relatedness of plague strains spreading across Europe during successive pandemics to the actual location of its historic reservoirs. Location of the infected humans does not necessarily tell you much about the origin of that outbreak, especially with so much plague being moved by about ship.
There is a lively discussion about these papers on twitter, between a few of us spanning history, microbiology and computational biology, if you want to hear about these things earlier.
http://eccmidlive.org/#resources/ancient-pathogen-genomics-w...
A big challenge is how to translate the genetic relatedness of plague strains spreading across Europe during successive pandemics to the actual location of its historic reservoirs. Location of the infected humans does not necessarily tell you much about the origin of that outbreak, especially with so much plague being moved by about ship.
There is a lively discussion about these papers on twitter, between a few of us spanning history, microbiology and computational biology, if you want to hear about these things earlier.
https://twitter.com/BorisVSchmid/status/726792491257724928
He also does a regular free podcast, reachable from the same address, which is worth a listen.