Mention plague and most people think of medieval rats. National Geographic's new feature on plague's long history makes the case for a different animal: the marmot. The University flagged the story on Tuesday, October 13, because it draws on UMN expertise.
The animal at the center is the tarbagan marmot, a burrowing rodent about the size of a house cat that is native to Siberia. Marmots survive plague infection 50% to 80% of the time. They also live in dense underground colonies where extended families share tunnels, which makes it easy for a pathogen to spread. The bacterium behind plague, Yersinia pestis, can survive more than 400 days in rodent nest bedding.
Marmots and plague have a long shared history. Researchers led by Ruairidh Macleod of the University of Oxford found Y. pestis in 18 people buried at hunter-gatherer cemeteries near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, dating to about 5,500 years ago. That is the oldest known human plague outbreak. Those graves also hold hundreds of marmot incisors that people wore as ornaments, which shows how close these communities lived to the animals.
People have long suspected the connection. During a 1910–1911 epidemic in Manchuria that killed roughly 60,000 people, local hunters told investigators they thought the marmots were making them sick. The risk hasn't gone away. In 2020, scientists described a husband and wife in western Mongolia who died after eating raw marmot organs. More recently, a 15-year-old boy in a nearby Mongolian province died after hunting and eating a marmot. Hunting marmots is illegal, but boodog, marmot cooked in its own skin, is still a national dish in Mongolia.
Susan Jones is UMN's contribution to the story. She's a historian and a veterinarian, and the magazine says she has spent a decade studying the Soviet anti-plague system, the network the USSR built to track and contain the disease. She works at the point where animal health and human health meet.
Jones is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Program in History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her research covers the historical ecology of disease, zoonotic diseases, and human-animal interactions. She has written two books: Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax (2010) and Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (2003).
If you're on campus and wondering why a history program has a vet on staff, this story is a good answer. Plague's story runs through Siberian burrows, Soviet field stations and Mongolian dinner tables, and you need people trained in both fields to follow it.
