Kyrgyzstan is seeking to attract more tourists by promoting its traditional kumis - fermented mare's milk - which locals drink and bathe in and say is good for their health. The move comes as interest in fermented and probiotic drinks is soaring in many countries. The importance of kumis to Kyrgyz culture is demonstrated by the fact that the Central Asian former Soviet republic's capital, Bishkek, is named after a paddle used to churn the fermenting milk. A farmer milks a horse at a high altitude summer pasture called Suusamyr, some 170 km (106 miles) south of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. REUTERS/Vladimir Pirogov Through promotional films and festivals, Kyrgyzstan is encouraging tourists to experience the traditional nomadic Kyrgyz lifestyle by sleeping in a yurt in a lush moun...
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A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who co-led the study, published on 15 June in Nature. An engraved tombstone of a person who died from the Black Death plague, from the Kara-D...
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