I had always assumed the Kansas theory, which is still on the table. The trenches of France are another. The third possible origin, argued strongly in the late 2000s and widely considered plausible is…. China.

The Plague could have- I recall reading the 1340s version entered the Eurosphere when Tatar besiegers sent corpses over the wall of one of the Genoese ports in Crimea, and off to the races. But I don’t know whether it was already also in the Levant, from whence it would have also had routes to Europe, or whether it went to the Levant later through Europe. Plus, it had been in Europe before with the Plague of Justinian, and not sure where that was from. Probably also via Persia from the East.

I only just learned that measles transitioned from animal rinderpest to a human disease only during the Middle Ages, though I don’t recall where. That’s shockingly recent for a new disease form.

Smallpox and some others, of course, probably in the earliest agricultural societies of the Mideast, since before recorded time.

Root issue is that prudent prior planning and developing a mindful awareness of what this whole globalization thing really implies did not happen. You cannot have a situation where the disease reservoirs in Southern China and tropical Africa are a few hours away from the rest of the world via airliner. At a minimum, you have to have distance and time between the new disease and “green fields” of the uninfected around the world. We never should have allowed a situation to where the Chinese Communists managed our information about the disease while simultaneously allowing those crooked bastards unfettered global access. And, it’s not like we didn’t have ample prior warning or example in SARS and the other outbreaks we’ve had. How many pandemics have come out of China because of their predilection for eating anything that moves? Even the friggin’ Black Plague probably came from some lunatic eating marmot along the Silk Road, and look what happened with that.

Frankly, at this point? I think putting China and the mainland Chinese on a permanent quarantine list would be justified. We’ve had how many major epidemics sourced out of China in the last century-plus, starting with the 1918 Influenza epidemic that got blamed on the Spanish because they were the only ones not censoring? I think that the only one that’s not of Chinese origin was the H1N1 epidemic, and I’m not so sure about that one, either…