In 2019, a plague genome from Laishevo, at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama Rivers in Russia, was published. The bacterium that killed this individual is the closest found so far to the great polytomy, and it is immediately ancestral to the strains that caused the Black Death. It is a trace of the plague's movement into western Eurasia on the eve of the Second Pandemic.⁵⁸
58. The Tian Shan plague focus lies at an important juncture between the Mongolian heartlands and the central steppe. It has been known since the 1950s that a series of gravestones carved by Nestorian Christians in this region suggested a severe epidemic in 1338-39. Ten of the inscriptions even mention a "pestilence." (...) It is not certain that Y. pestis caused the epidemic, but if it did this raises the intriguing possibility that the pandemic explosion of the Black Death was here in the years before its appearance in the west.
"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper
