The Black Death was one of the deadliest plagues in European history and in the 1300s wiped out an estimated 60 per cent of the continent’s population.
It was so cataclysmic that some studies have claimed it killed so many people it led to a mini-Ice Age.
But alongside the unparalleled death and devastation, the plague left a terrifying genetic mark on the ancestors of the survivors that’s still affecting us almost 700 years later.
