Challenges to the theory surrounding the Black Death

The snags with this scenario are legion. For example, there are no descriptions of dead rats lying everywhere (this is explained by suggesting that either the rats were indoors, or people were so used to dead rats that they were not worth mentioning; though if they were indoors how did they travel so fast?)

a) indeed who would write about a dead bleeping rat when millions of people had a horrible plague?
b) dogs & cats ate rats, dead or alive
c) rats traveled with shipments of food, commerce & people. Think about the phrase "rats fleeing the sinking ship". This means that there were rats which joined up on intercontinental boat rides. It's pretty sure that they would join wagon trains too.

Originally posted by ZeddicusZulZorander
I found this to be quite interesting. It seems that one researcher is noticing inconsistencies in the historical accounts of the Black Death. His research is starting to lead toward:

1) people and not rats were possibly responsible for the spread of the disease
2) it might not have been the bubonic plague at all

I see a number of problems with the research, some of which have already been covered (lots of things eat rats, they had people who had the title "ratcatcher" who removed rats and vermin).

* The bacteria is carried by rats and mice and squirrels and other rodents, all of which were present in the cities and country.
* Rat and mice remains are not commonly found in large quantities in ANY dig.
* The bacteria can move to the lungs -- that form of the plague is transmitted from person to person.
* Hygiene wasn't very good back then. You can also get it from tending the sick.
* the documents about it weren't written by medical people who diagnose the illnesses. Just ask any ten people to describe a cold and you'll see how wildly accounts can vary.

Is it possible that we don't know enough about this one event that was just a few hundred years ago, and if so then how much could our theories of dinosaur extinction or even how the pyramids were built be accurate enough to call them solved?

We will always modify theories when new data arises. Think of the answers as "questions about a crime." We don't always get every single bit of evidence about any crime but we can get enough evidence for proof of the cause and the circumstances in many cases (like the murder of Julius Caesar. We weren't there, but there's a lot of documents about it. We don't know every person at the scene or where the wounds were or which one finally did him in or whether he really said what he did, but we can say he's dead, the Senate was implicated, Cleopatra was in town (we don't know where or what Caesars wife was doing during all this) and Rome ended up with a series of bad emperors after him.