The only plague I’ve heard of that had civilization altering effects was the black plague in Europe. But today I read that a version of hantavirus may have run through north america in the 1500s, killing 95% of the Indians. This is supposedly why white settlers had an easier time colonizing this continent (and why there are very few Indians in the US while continents like south america, Africa and Asia are still full of natives despite being colonized).
So what other epidemics have destroyed civilizations or at least altered them drastically?
The first big instance of the bubonic plague, to my knowledge, was in the 550’s, during the reign of Justinian. He had fought to reunite the East and West Roman Empires driven by his general Belisarius, but the onset of the plague halted his quest and arguably put the final nail in the coffin of the Roman Empire.
The hantavirus plague was just one of several plagues that swept through the Americas from about 1500 to 1540. Smallpox went through several times. While the percentages are controversial, the few records from around then indicate a huge loss of life. Far exceeding the black plague in Europe. Certainly, the huge loss of life made it possible, at a minimum much easier, for Europeans to colonize the Americas. Something that was noted by the Europeans at the time. “1491” by Charles C. Mann is a well documented book on the subject. Mann certainly makes his opinions well known, but he did a lot of research and has an extensive bibliography.
I am no expert, but I doubt there has ever in the history of man been another de-population event like the plagues in the Americas.
There was a terrible population bottleneck before we even left Africa. It might not have been as bad in terms of absolute numbers, but it was a far bigger percentage of the human population. I don’t know if anyone knows what caused it, though.
How does the loss of even a majority of a population alter a civilization though when the level of development does not rely on a sophisticated socioeconomic structure? In the case of nomadic and semi-nomadic populations, I’m not sure I see what the consequences to the language, culture, oral traditions, mythology, etc. would be.
In the case of a structure like that of the Aztecs or Mayas, the point would be self-evident, but I don’t think that is the argument being made for the native Americans of North America - or is it? I honestly have no idea.
Something like the black plague though is credited by many for the Renaissance. I don’t recall exactly the logic of that though. Something like, years of terror and death, relief at having survived . . . profit, or rather, Renaissance.
However I think there are also much more subtle effects that one can probably never verify. For example, as an OCD sufferer, I believe that the Black Death is probably responsible for an increase in the prevalence of OCD in people of European descent. If you make the not too crazy assumption that people who had an innate fear of contamination (one type of OCD) would be statistically less likely to become infected as a result of being more fastidious (just as one example), then the plague would have served as an evolutionary selection mechanism for this trait.
And since many psychiatric conditions in their subclinical form (i.e., non-pathological form) can be beneficial in a variety of ways, the emergence of this trait may have had any number of effects we may never fully understand or appreciate.
The Plague of Athens in 430 B.C. devastated the city in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, killing Pericles among many others. Without it their war with Sparta and her league may have taken a very different turn.
The unknown ‘Sweating sickness’ in 15th century England may have killed Prince Arthur, Henry VII’s heir apparent. As a result Henry became king, with all the change of his reign.
The 1666 Great Plague of London had a huge impact of the city, likewise the 1770 Russian plague greatly impacted Moscow and the military capabilities of Russia under Catherine the Great. A cholera outbreak in London prompted review of the centuries held miasma ‘bad air’ theory of disease.
Multiple waves of plague in 18th century Spain, notably in Seville weakened a Spanish Empire already struggling with other European powers.
It’s been many decades since I read “Rats, Lice, and History,” by Hans Zinsser, but I highly recommend it. His thesis, if I remember correctly, is that the history of human civilization had far more to do with disease than with great leaders and battles.
In the case of the Renaissance, once all the dying was done, you had a net increase in both absolute wealth and the value of labour (stuff being more available and labour rarer). You also had a bunch of people willing to ask tough questions about life, the universe, and everything that they might not have been willing to ask in 1345.
The Plague was probably the death knell for the Cornish language. It took another 400 years to die, but though both England and Cornwall probably lost the same percentage, the reduction in absolute numbers of Cornish speakers and their small percentage of the whole population meant that the culture was not sustainable in the long term. That probably happened to smaller cultures in every major plague.
Also, for the comment about Justinian’s Flea, are we sure it was Bubonic Plague?
Not a human disease, but the introduction of the (recently eradicated) rinderpest into Abyssinia by the Italians in the 1890s is considered a major factor in the European colonization of sub-Saharan Africa.
The North American Indians, at least those east of the Mississippi, **weren’t **fundamentally nomadic until the plagues (far more than hantavirus BTW - smallpox, cholera, measles, mumps, influenza among others) wiped out ~90% of them over a period of decades.
The loss was utterly devastating to their culture; the remnants of villages and whole tribes had to band together with erstwhile enemies to simply survive, and this triggered the nomadism Europeans thought was their normal state. Remember that the diseases often hit and killed before Europeans even got there. And there were no wild horses in North America at this stage.
In the aforementioned book **1491 **Mann tells about the first European to see the Mississippi, de Soto, who trailed around with a small army and brought along for food a herd of pigs. He was amazed to see the natives so thickly settled along the banks of the river that you could literally throw a stone from one village into the next one.
The next European there was the Frenchman Champlain, about 70 years later. The villages were deserted and he and his men walked through piles - *piles *- of bones of the dead natives. Between the diseases carried by the Spanish men and their pigs, the entire local culture was wiped out.
Most Indians, whether in North, Central, or South America, were settled agriculturalists both before and after the arrival of Europeans. There were relatively few nomadic groups, such as the Plains Indians (whose buffalo-hunting culture arose mainly after the introduction of horses by Europeans) and some groups in California. Even most groups inhabiting rain forests are agriculturalists; true nomadic hunter-gatherers were rare.
Yes. According to a NOVA episode, homo sapiens passed through a bottleneck with 600 breeding individuals. 600! The event reflected pronounced selective factors and was thought to be related to an increase in environmental variability, according to the show.
50,000 years ago there were perhaps 4 human species. 10,000 years ago there was one.
At the time, a large amount of the population believed that washing too often was bad for you (they had seen that water was linked to waterborne infections, but connected the information the wrong way): someone with OCD might have been less likely to wash…
You’ll note that I said ‘fear of contamination.’ That doesn’t have to mean soap and water especially since I don’t think soap was invented yet.
The plague was transmitted, or at least is believed to have been transmitted by fleas. Someone with OCD would probably have been more averse to sharing their bed with insects than other folks of the day.
I don’t recall the details, but I recall reading about the anglosaxon settlement of celtic England. The celts during a critical time suffered a serious plague; the drop in population resulted in an inability to defend their territory. Along with the anglo expansion it also resulted in the orthodox Christian church replacing a Christianity based on one of the popular heresies of the time.
Soap is a vague term, but if you just mean a surfactant people use to clean themselves or objects, then it is thousands of years old. I know Egyptians have had it since Ancient times, I’m not at all familiar with whether or not Europeans knew of it or used it.
It’s very difficult to meaningfully speculate about what hangups someone with OCD would have in the 1300s. We know that all kinds of mental illnesses, personality disorders or etc are heavily influenced by culture in terms of the way they manifest. A schizophrenic person in the United States is likely to believe the CIA is watching them or the government is trying to control their thoughts with sound waves or radio signals or etc. One in a less developed region, say in Africa, will believe they are being taken over by bad spirits.
OCD people in the modern era would be very fastidious about things like hand washing but there isn’t necessarily any reason to assume OCD people in the 1300s would have obsessions relating to actual good hygiene practices. They’d have no mechanism to know about good hygiene practices. Nor would things like sharing a bed be seen as “less fastidious”, mind most of these people were peasants.
True, but it’s pretty well established that many things which evoke a visceral feeling of disgust seem to be hard wired. That’s why I used the term ‘fear of contamination.’
As for the difference between soap and a surfactant, some of us prefer to avoid swigging from the pedagogy jug this early in the morning.
