It's plausible that the black plague was spread by gerbils rather than rats.
It seems to me that I should lower my trust in something, but what? Any claim related to biology which hasn't been checked against DNA/big data?
You should lower your credence in the specificity of hypotheses. When someone says that there is a theory about "rats," is it really the genus Rattus or the order Rodentia?
I don't know about the credibility of the Smithsonian, but most contrarian claims about the cause of the Black Death are complete nonsense and are invalidated by DNA evidence.
DNA establishes that the plague was caused by a particular bacterium that lives in fleas, mainly on rodents. The hypotheses that it was spread directly between humans or by human fleas are possible, but no...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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