Discovery and Dilemma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents the first paleogenetic evidence for Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, in the immediate area of Constantinople in the sixth century, the epicenter of surviving first-pandemic narratives. Construction of a natural gas pipeline led to the discovery and excavation of a late antique necropolis in the Bosna Çiftliği locality (near modern Silivri, ancient Selymbria) of Fatih Mahallesi, some fifty miles west of Istanbul within meters of the Anastasian Long Wall. Y. pestis was recovered from the dental remains of a single individual from that site. While a genome has not been drafted and the place of this Y. pestis in plague’s family tree remains uncertain, the detection is robust, as is the sixth-century dating. What follows reports the finding and examines what this Y. pestis detection could mean for our histories of the Justinianic Plague and the First Plague Pandemic. An attempt is also made to bring readers behind the scenes and to articulate both the difficulties of recovering pathogen remnants from long-dead people and the untold burdens that can accompany paleogenetics lab work. We emphasize that the discovery presents a dilemma as there is no one way to interpret the find and that we must be more conscious of both the destructive analysis and neglected toll paleogenetics lab work can entail.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.071 | 0.118 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.043 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.031 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".