Even the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, we are now being told, practised racial discrimination as it raged through Europe wiping out maybe half of the existing population. The new idea is that black people were more likely to die from the plague than white ones. The ‘evidence’ presented by an American researcher and an employee of the Museum of London consists of skull measurements where there are said to be signs of black ancestry; it is not derived from DNA, which would be much more comprehensive.