It was the gerbils!

Gerbils caused the Black Plague

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Black rats may not have been to blame for numerous outbreaks of the bubonic plague across Europe, a study suggests.

Scientists believe repeat epidemics of the Black Death, which arrived in Europe in the mid-14th Century, instead trace back to gerbils from Asia.

Prof Nils Christian Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, said: "If we're right, we'll have to rewrite that part of history."

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The Black Death, which originated in Asia, arrived in Europe in 1347 and caused one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history. Over the next 400 years, epidemics broke out again and again, killing millions of people.

It had been thought that black rats were responsible for allowing the plague to establish in Europe, with new outbreaks occurring when fleas jumped from infected rodents to humans.

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However, Prof Stenseth and his colleagues do not think a rat reservoir was to blame.

They compared tree-ring records from Europe with 7,711 historical plague outbreaks to see if the weather conditions would have been optimum for a rat-driven outbreak.

He said: "For this, you would need warm summers, with not too much precipitation. Dry but not too dry. "And we have looked at the broad spectrum of climatic indices, and there is no relationship between the appearance of plague and the weather."

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Instead, the team believes that specific weather conditions in Asia may have caused another plague-carrying rodent - the giant gerbil - to thrive. And this then later led to epidemics in Europe.

"We show that wherever there were good conditions for gerbils and fleas in central Asia, some years later the bacteria shows up in harbour cities in Europe and then spreads across the continent," Prof Stenseth said.

He said that a wet spring followed by a warm summer would cause gerbil numbers to boom. "Such conditions are good for gerbils. It means a high gerbil population across huge areas and that is good for the plague," he added.

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The gerbil mafia has been in all out war with humanity throughout history. Look at what they did to Richard Gere. Grand gerbil conspiracy I tell you.