
How Devastating was the Black Death? - akakievich
http://www.medievalhistories.com/devastating-black-death/
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goblin89
Actual paper is titled “Next-generation ice core technology reveals true
minimum natural levels of lead (Pb) in the atmosphere: Insights from the Black
Death”.

The gist is that we’ve been operating under wrong assumptions about what
normal background levels of lead in the atmosphere are like. What we used to
consider normal turns out to be affected by pre-industrial human activities
way more than we thought. Natural lead levels, as the paper shows, are much
lower. Assuming we’ve found the true baseline levels, we see that we and our
ancestors were/are being exposed to higher, relative to baseline, lead levels
than we thought.

The main kicker of this research to me is that it puts into question some
_previous_ research pertaining to human health and lead (which, as we do
already know, don’t go well together at all—the friendly paper[0] provides a
summary), as well as current public health measures.

[0]
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GH000064/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GH000064/full)

~~~
heymijo
Clair Patterson, during a 60 year quest to prove that lead in our modern
environment was harmful, went to tremendous lengths to find evidence of pre-
industrial levels of lead. This is the guy who invented the clean room and
associated techniques.

Were he alive today I imagine he would be glad to see this research ongoing.

Fascinating (and long) read about his journey here.
[http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-
scienti...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-
who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it)

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sillysaurus3
Malaria is also intriguing. According to Michael Stevens, as many as half of
all humans who have ever lived (~50 billion) have died to Malaria. I've always
wondered whether this was true.
[https://youtu.be/1T4XMNN4bNM?t=235](https://youtu.be/1T4XMNN4bNM?t=235)

~~~
vacri
I remember reading an article by an African bloke in healthcare (can't recall
the actual role) who was saying that the West's obsession with malaria is
patronising. He said that malaria is like the flu - you get it, you're sick
for a little while, then you get over it. Yes, some people die, but they tend
to be the old and weak, just like the flu - yet the west doesn't go bananas
over the flu like it does with malaria.

Looking at the wikipedia articles for both, it seems he has a point. 300M
cases of malaria in 2015, with 750k deaths. 3-5M cases of influenza annually,
with 350k deaths.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza)

Given those numbers, I'm not sure I'd believe that half of all humans died
from malaria.

~~~
ajross
Influenza has a cheap and very effective family of vaccines. Malaria doesn't.
People in "the west" "go bananas" over Malaria because it's not reasonably
preventable.

~~~
maxerickson
Malaria was eradicated in the US and Europe. It used to be endemic.
Eradication is a pretty solid way to prevent it.

[https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html)

~~~
ajross
Except it hasn't worked everywhere. The point was that this was a practical
issue and not a cultural one. Someone in "the west" who is paranoid about
getting the flu just gets a flu shot. The same paranoia for Malaria has no
treatment, so the same person with the same fears ends up "going bananas"
about travel to Central America or whatnot.

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tomohawk
It was devastating enough to end the Mongol empire. This empire included
pretty much all of Asia. With the demise of the empire, the silk road trade
pretty much closed down, cutting China off from the Middle East and Europe.

~~~
throwaway7645
I didn't know it went that far east. So it pretty much completely changed the
course of events instead of just delaying progress for a few
decades...interesting.

~~~
Spooky23
Keep in mind that the mongols didn't really have the institutions to survive
anyway and that the empire was breaking apart anyway.

The plague was a stressor that sped some things along.

~~~
boomboomsubban
The plague didn't hit until after the Mongol empire fracture. I don't know
what institutions you think the Mongols were missing, but an empire that size
is just waiting to fragment.

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Mz
_For many years historians depended on written sources to assess the calamity
of such events as the Black Death. This yielded widely disparate conclusions
claiming that the death-toll lay between 30 to 50%...

Now, a new study of annual to multiannual levels of lead in the Alpine
glacier, Colle Gnifetti, in the Swiss-Italian Alps provides further validation
of the calamitous character of the plague and the accompanying events in the
14th century. These new hard-core data demonstrates the impact which the Black
Death had on society and economy._

It's nice to have something that is potentially objective.

~~~
Retric
It's still rather indirect. If the population drops significantly then many
types of mining simply becomes redundant because there is so much material no
longer needed by the dead.

~~~
mirimir
Well, lead deposition dropped about two orders of magnitude in ~1350. That's
far more than a proportional decrease, unless the death rate was over 90%.
Societal collapse seems more likely.

~~~
ajross
Not collapse: recycling. In a steady state population, you need to be mining
enough new metal to replace items lost to use or rust. If the population
drops, people just start using dead uncle Harald's knives when theirs break.

In such a situation, you'd actually expect expensive new production to drop
all the way to zero until the recycling buffer was used up. The effect would
be superlinear with the death rate, not proportional.

~~~
mirimir
Maybe so. But maybe the recycling argument doesn't apply so much for lead as
for iron.

~~~
ajross
The contention in the linked article was that atmospheric lead was the result
of metal smelting. They're measuring the mining industry as a whole, not lead
production.

~~~
mirimir
Whatever they say, they're measuring production of lead and other metals that
occur with it. Silver, copper and zinc would be the main ones, I think. Not
iron, however.

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blahedo
I'm also a little curious about what happened about a century later—the line
drops by about 90% for another decade or so in the mid-1400s. It's the only
other significant drop in the chart (other than a single outlier datum in the
late 1800s that might be an error of some sort).

~~~
evgen
There was a devastating cold period in the 1430s (cause still unknown to the
best of my knowledge) that caused widespread global famine and in the 1450s
the south Pacific volcano Kuwae had what seems to be two stratospheric
eruptions within the decade. It was, in general, a shitty time to be alive no
matter where you were on the planet.

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dsfyu404ed
tl;dr pretty fucking bad.

This article use the presence of particles associated with mining found in ice
cores of European glaciers to conclude that mining basically collapsed and
that it was in fact "pretty fucking bad".

------
chx
The Black Death killed almost everyone settled (ie not a bedouin) in
Palestine. This is important because no one can claim their ancestors lived on
the land for a really long time. The region which supported million (perhaps
even millions) two thousand years ago had less than 150K people around 1400.
It won't even double by 1800 and for a good reason: given how arid the region
is/was, not tending it constantly made almost all of Palestine into a barren
wasteland except a few places like the Valley of Jezreel. It was just a (very)
dusty backwater of the Damascus Eyalet of practically zero political
importance. That has, of course, changed in more recent history.

~~~
rjzzleep
Source? How much is "almost everyone". Why bring the Israel discussion into
this topic to begin with?

