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" Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis, and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had shown that, just like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death in the 1340s had also originated in China. With a publicly available database of the full sequence, the history and the genetics can be aligned. Over a five-year period we can track a course from Russia to Constantinople, to Messina, to Genoa, Marseille, Bordeaux, and finally London. All these ports acted as points from which radiation of the plague could crawl inland. En route, it claimed the lives of some 5 million people. "
― Adam Rutherford , A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes
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" Within the region of DNA that was apparently undergoing evolution in response to the plague is a family of genes with typically clunky names.* They’re called Toll-like receptors, or TLRs, and the proteins they encode sit on the surface of immune cells such as those hungry macrophages and sentinel cells. There they vigilantly await the advent of microbes with very specific markings. Upon identification of such an invader, an immune klaxon goes off, and the innate army of cells that protect us from within is activated. TLRs 1, 2, 6, and 10 are the combination that recognizes Yersinia pestis, and there they are, as a cluster, sitting right in that zone that has subtly but measurably evolved in Romas and Romanians, but not in the rest of the world. The mark of the plague is in our genes. "
― Adam Rutherford , A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes
96
" lies Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Chile. There, in 1830, Captain Robert Fitzroy docked an exploration vessel, and as part of hostile negotiations seized three Fuegians, boys named el’leparu and o’run-del’lico, and a girl named yok’cushly. They were given absurd English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket—as part of a bizarre colonial experiment to see if these savages could be “civilized.” Fitzroy took them to England (a fourth named Boat Memory was also taken, but died of smallpox after they arrived; his real, Fuegian name is lost). "
― Adam Rutherford , A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes