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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, Feb. 23 - Mar. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 not popular. Almost everyone agrees that it was spread by fleas on rodents, but there is some disagreement about which rodents. It isn't even clear that there is a single rodent vector. For example, perhaps the fast spread was by rats on ships, but the spread inland was by native rodents.
How certain were you, before, that it was spread by rats?
The thing to lower might be your general confidence in historical information other than what's clearly supported by multiple sources who were in a position to know.
I was sure it was spread by rats-- I didn't see any reason to doubt what everyone seemed to agree on. Unfortunately, poking round online has reminded me of an article I read within the past few years that I haven't been able to find again, which included the point that pigeon coops (in England?) weren't designed to prevent rat depredation, so rats were either absent or not prevalent at the time of the plague there.
This article goes with the gerbil theory, but says that rats probably made a small contribution to spreading plague.
Here's an argument that it was people, not rodents, which spread black plague in England, and suggests that we don't know whether it was bubonic plague or some other disease.