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Just as Marius was coming to power as Consul in 107 BC, a major migration by Germanic (perhaps Celtic) Cimbri was causing consternation along Rome's northern frontier. Apparently under threat of starvation from poor harvests and from external threats by other tribes, the Cimbri were on the move looking for new, more promising land. By 113 BC, the Germanics made their first appearance in Roman written history. These movements, and associated great losses in the Roman army stood as the main reason for Marius' military reforms, and not some great advocacy for the plebes, as the people of the time generally believed.....

After the defeat of Carbo, the Cimbri crossed the Rhine and threatened territory belonging to the Roman allied Allobroges. Tribal leaders attempted to negotiate land rights for their people, but all such requests were denied. By 109 BC, the Romans sent another force under the Consul Marcus Junius Silanus but again were soundly defeated, losing as many as 30,000 men. The Cimbri, however, not showing any desire to invade or cause trouble, went about their own business, looking for land in Gaul. In 107 BC another Roman army under the command of Longinus met up with the Cimbri near modern Tolosa. In addition to fresh recruits Longinus also led the veterans of Metellus' army from Africa, whose ultimate defeat along with the earlier losses, forced Marius to recruit from the Roman head count. Longinus was initially successful, but was eventually caught in an ambush. Killed in action, his subordinate, Laenas was forced to surrender his position and return to Rome with fewer than 4,000 survivors.

In 104 BC, however, the Cimbri had moved on, and Marius spent the time reforming his legions, building roads and generally improving the condition of the provincial public works. Within 2 years, the Cimbri had joined up with more Germanics, including the Teutons, Helvetii and Ambrones. Failing to win new land in Spain from the Celts, they returned to what they may have thought would be easier adversaries in the Romans. In 102 BC, the Cimbri moved around the Alps to the eastern side of Italy preparing to invade. The Teutones moved to the west and followed the Alps south along the coast into Italy. Marius caught the Teutones and Ambrones at the battle of Aquae Sextiae late in the year 102 BC. This time, under competent Roman command, the Germanics were annihilated, and the Romans could focus on their other enemy, the Cimbri.

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The thing is that we all know the who brought the genes, and the light skin genes are not light skin genes but RATHER ALBINISM GENES! The blue eyed African hunter gatherers HAD OCULAR ALBINISM!

So the chances of there being BLACK EUROPEAN ALBINO'S BACK THEN WAS ALSO VERY HIGH! And since countries like black countries like Tanzania have high rates of albinism, this means that the light skin migrants into Europe were none other THEN THE ALBINO'S DESCRIBED IN THE BIBLE, AND Albino BLACK ANATOLIAN MIGRANTS!

Those albino's went into take refuge in Northern and Western Europe away from MAJOR POPULATION CENTERS IN EUROPE AT THAT TIME!

When plagues began to hit Black Europe's main population centers (mostly in Southern Europe at the time), the light skinned Human albino's started overpopulating Northern Europe, and the Central Asian barbarian migration started happening from the east, THEN THAT IS WHEN DARK SKIN STARTS DISAPPEARING IN EUROPE!

People ARE IGNORING PLAGUES AND EPIDEMICS EFFECTS ON DEMOGRAPHICS! Mike and yourself also fail to understand the major effects of this.

With outbreaks and plagues like the BUBONIC PLAGUE and THE BLACK DEATH, THE MAJOR POPULATION CENTERS IN EUROPE WERE WIPED CLEAN!

Then there was the MINI ICE AGE! You have a MAJOR climatic shift and weather change that WIPED OUT MAJOR SEGMENTS OF EUROPE'S ORIGINAL DARK POPULATIONS!

This means that the original Black European populations were killed mostly AND NOT THE NORTHERN LIGHT ALBINO PEOPLES IN EUROPE HIDING IN THE FORESTS!

Once the plagues, climate ice age weather and various wars had already taken place, Black Europe was vulnerable to barbarian and outside aggression. This paved the way for a major demographic change with albino's taking over Europe.

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
And please let's keep the hostility and personal attacks down, and debate/argue over this in a mature neutral intelligent manner.

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
[QB] Let's see the Indo-Europeans were not a settled civilization, they had no civilization to they migrated from place to place

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Originally posted by Mike111:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
And please let's keep the hostility and personal attacks down, and debate/argue over this in a mature neutral intelligent manner.

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There is no other way to say ridiculous, but to say ridiculous. That's not hostility, that's just what you get for spewing nonsense with no factual basis. Btw - how does one debate something with no facts? I say this, you say that, and we go on forever.

Full Definition of RIDICULOUS
: arousing or deserving ridicule : extremely silly or unreasonable : absurd, preposterous

I am beginning to believe that you come up with these theories while on the toilet.

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Originally posted by kdolo:
Can u provide a timeline of these climactic changes, natural disasters plagues, etc. Along side a timeline of these nomads coming in ???

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1300 onset of little ice age

1347 the black death

1600 little ice age

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Great Famine
Beginning in the spring of 1315, cold weather and torrential rains decimated crops and livestock across Europe. Class warfare and political strife destabilized formerly prosperous countries as millions of people starved, setting the stage for the crises of the Late Middle Ages. According to reports, some desperate Europeans resorted to cannibalism during the so-called Great Famine, which persisted until the early 1320s.

Black Death
Typically considered an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which is transmitted by rats and fleas, the Black Death wreaked havoc on Europe, North Africa and Central Asia in the mid-14th century. It killed an estimated 75 million people, including 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. Some experts have tied the outbreak to the food shortages of the Little Ice Age, which purportedly weakened human immune systems while allowing rats to flourish.

Manchu Conquest of China
In the first half of the 17th century, famines and floods caused by unusually cold, dry weather enfeebled China’s ruling Ming Dynasty. Unable to pay their taxes, peasants rose up in revolt and by 1644 had overthrown the imperial authorities. Manchurian invaders from the north capitalized on the power vacuum by crossing the Great Wall, allying with the rebels and establishing the Qing Dynasty.

Witch Hunts
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII recognized the existence of witches and echoed popular sentiment by blaming them for the cold temperatures and resulting misfortunes plaguing Europe. His declaration ushered in an era of hysteria, accusations and executions on both sides of the Atlantic. Historians have shown that surges in European witch trials coincided with some of the Little Ice Age’s most bitter phases during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Thirty Years’ War
Among other military conflicts, the brutal Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics across central Europe has been linked to the Little Ice Age. Chilly conditions curbed agricultural production and inflated grain prices, fueling civil discontent and weakening the economies of European powers. These factors indirectly plunged much of the continent into war from 1618 to 1648, according to this model.

Rise of the Potato
When Spanish conquistadors first introduced the potato in the late 16th century, Europeans scoffed at the unfamiliar starch. In the mid-1700s, however, some countries began promoting the hardy tuber as an alternative to crops indigenous to the region, which often failed to withstand the Little Ice Age’s colder seasons. It soon caught on with farmers throughout Europe, particularly in Ireland.

French Revolution
As the 18th century drew to a close, two decades of poor cereal harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor in France. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes yet failed to provide relief by rioting, looting and striking. Tensions erupted into the French Revolution of 1789, which some historians have connected to the Little Ice Age.

Writing of “Frankenstein”
In 1816, dust from volcanic eruptions and the general chill of the Little Ice Age resulted in the famously frosty “year without a summer” across the Northern Hemisphere. Like many Europeans, teenage runaway Mary Shelley kept warm by huddling around a fire with her friends. One of them, the poet Lord Byron, encouraged his companions to write and share their own supernatural tales; Mary’s was published two years later as “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.”

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

ca. 75,000 - 100,000 Greece 429–426 BC Known as Plague of Athens, because it was primarily in Athens. unknown, similar to typhoid
ca. 30% of population Europe, Western Asia, Northern Africa 165–180 Known as Antonine Plague, due to the name of the Roman emperor in power at the time. unknown, symptoms similar to smallpox
Europe 250-266 AD Know as the Plague of Cyprian named after St. Cyprian Bishop of Carthage. unknown, possibly smallpox
ca. 40% of population Europe 541–542 Known as Plague of Justinian, due to the name of the Byzantine emperor in power at the time. Bubonic plague [1]
30% to 70% of population Europe 1346–1350 Known as "Black Death" or Second plague pandemic, first return of the plague to Europe after the Justinianic plague of the 6th century. plague

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Aka Saka, Alani, Altyn Oba, the Amazons, Aorsi, the Avars, the Barsils, the Bartang, the Bashkir, Basileani, Bokhai, Budini, the Bulgars, theBuqei, the Burtas, the Buryats, the Chionites, Choban, Chor, the Cimmerians, the Cumans, Dahae, Eastern Turkiut, Ertin, Far Eastern Province, Free Sarmarti, Gargari, Gelae, Gok Turkiut, Gyula, Haraiva, the Hephtalites, the Hsien-Pi, the Hsiung-Nu, the Huns, Iaxamate, Iazyges, the Issedones, the Juan-Juan, the Kalmucks (Oirat), Kamchatka, Kapan, Karabai, the Kayi, the Kazakh Horde, Khakass, the Khazars, Kimak, Kipchak, Kukhei, Kutrigur, Legae, Magadan, the early Magyars, the Massagetai, Mathura, the Melanchaeni, Northern Hsiung-nu, the Oghuz, Onogundar, Parni, the Pechenegs, the Roshani, Roxolanoi, the Sabir, Saii, Saka Haumavarna, Saka Paradraya, Saka Tigrakhauda, Sakae, the Sarmatians, Sauromatae, the Scythians, Siraces, Southern Hsiung-nu, Suren, Tolmach, the Torghuts, early Turks, Tannu Tuva, the Thyssagetae, Utrigur, Vladivostok, Yabghu, and Yakutiya.

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Originally posted by kdolo:
Ok. So the Black Europeans ...

Weakened and reduced by plaques which disproprtionatley affect dense population center, climate changes, general cultural decline, and invasions are overwhelmed by agressive Albinos....

These albinos come in as nomads, refugees, but eventually due to numbers make their way up the social ladder and eventually usurp Black rule altogether and rewrite history.

The part i dont get.

Why do you insist that the Dravidians mixed with Black Euro Albinos ........as opposed to the non Albino Black Euros. ??

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A
Adogit, Aelvaeones, Aeragnaricii, Ahelmil, Alamanni or Alemanni, Ambrones, Ampsivarii or Ampsivari, Anglii/Angli or Angles/Engla or Englisc, Angrivarii or Angrivari, Arochi, Atuatuci, Augandzi, Avarpi, Aviones.

B
Baemi, Banchaemae, Batavii or Batavi, Batavians, Batini, Bavarii, Bergio, Brisgavi, Brondings, Bructeri, Burgundiones, Buri.

C
Calucones, Canninefates, Casuari, Caritni, Chaedini, Chaemae, Chaetuori, Chali, Chamavi, Charudes, Chasuarii, Chattuarii, Chauci, Cherusci, Chatti, Cimbri, Cobandi, Condrusi, Corconti, Curiones.

D
Danduti, Dani, Dauciones, Diduni, Dulgubnii.

E
Eburones, Eudoses, Eunixi, Evagres.

F
Favonae, Fervir, Finni, Firaesi, Forsi, Franks, Frisii, Fundusi, Fischer.

G
Gambrivii, Gauthigoth, Geats, Gepidae, Gutes, Grannii.

H
Hallin, Harii, Harudes, Hasdingi, Helisii, Helveconae, Heruli, Hermunduri, Hilleviones, Horder.

I
Ingriones, Ingvaeones (North Sea Germans), Intuergi, Irminones (Elbe Germans), Istvaeones (Rhine-Weser Germans).

J
Jutes, Juthungi.

L
Lacringi, Landi, Lemovii, Lentienses Levoni, Lombards or Langobardes, Liothida, Lugii.

M
Manimi, Marcomanni, Marsi, Marsaci, Marsigni, Marvingi, Mattiaci, Mixi, Mugilones.

N
Naharvali, Narisci or Naristi, Nemetes, Nertereanes, Nervii, Njars, Nuitones, Norwegians.

O
Ostrogoths, Otingis.

P
Pharodini.

Q
Quadi.

R
Racatae, Racatriae, Ranii, Raumarici, Reudigni, Rugii, Rus', Ruticli.

S
Sabalingi, Saxons, Scirii, Segni, Semnoni or Semnones, Sibini, Sidini, Sigulones, Silingi, Sitones, Suarini or Suardones, Suebi or Suevi, Suetidi, Suiones, Sugambri.

T
Taetel, Tencteri, Teuriochaemae, Teutonoari, Teutons, Theustes, Thuringii, Toxandri, Treveri, Triboci, Tubanti, Tungri, Turcilingi, Turoni.

U
Ubii, Ulmerugi, Usipetes, Usipi or Usippi.

V
Vagoth, Vandals, Vangiones, Vargiones, Varini, Varisci, Vinoviloth, Viruni, Visburgi, Visigoths, Vispi.

Z
Zumi.

Mythical founders

The preserved mythical founders and namesakes of some Germanic tribes:

Angul — Angles (the Kings of Mercia, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, other Anglo-Saxon dynasties are derived from other descendants of Woden)

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https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-1997/problems-in-studying-the-role-of-blacks-in-europe

Problems in Studying the Role of Blacks in Europe

(excerpt)

Africa and Africans have had an influence on European thought and culture far disproportionate to the size of the small black population (which, for example, approached 150,000 in the Iberian peninsula in the 16th century, and by the 18th amounted to just several thousand in France, a few thousand in the Netherlands, and several hundred scattered through Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia; only in the 20th century would the combined numbers reach the hundreds of thousands). The most striking example of that disproportionate influence can be seen in the 20th century, in Soviet Russia, which as part of its messianic role chose Black Africa and blacks in America as symbols for the Communist championing of the downtrodden; elected blacks as honorary members of the Moscow City Council; and named a mountain after Paul Robeson.

--Allison Blakeley, May 1997

Allison Blakeley
professor of European and comparative history at Howard University, is the author of Blacks in the Dutch World (Indiana University Press, 1994) and Russia and the Negro (Howard University Press, 1986).

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Originally posted by Mike111:
Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

The first civilizations in Crete and Italy and Southern Europe was by Black migrants from Africa!

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

The first civilizations in Crete and Italy and Southern Europe was by Black migrants from Africa!

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The problem is that you made that up

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

Originally posted by Mike111:
Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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Originally posted by Mike111:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

The first civilizations in Crete and Italy and Southern Europe was by Black migrants from Africa!

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The problem is that you made that up

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^Mindovermatter - do you now see why posting what you THINK in your head, as opposed to what you can PROVE, is a bad idea?

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Originally posted by Mike111:

Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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Originally posted by Mike111:

Europe was populated by Blacks from Africa and West Asia.
But Africa and West Asia WAS NOT EMPTIED OF BLACKS!!!

BUT ASIA "WAS" EMPTIED OF IT'S CAUCASIAN ALBINOS!!!!

Therefore at the end, there were more Albinos in Europe than Blacks.

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
The problem is that I have provided all the proof there is and the logic behind it. It's simply up to people's own personal decisions to accept the truth or not.

My explanation is the best explanation for what happened and how the present White European genomic record came to be.

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Originally posted by Mike111:


Europe was populated by Blacks from Africa and West Asia.
But Africa and West Asia WAS NOT EMPTIED OF BLACKS!!!

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:


Why is this so hard to believe?

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because you made it up
 

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Posted by Mindovermatter (Member # 22317) on :
 
Mike and Xyman, you are kidding yourself if you think this major climatic event did not play a role in the population replacement of Black Europeans by Eurasian white migrants from Eurasia during the fall of the Roman empire:


Take a look:

http://www.ancientdestructions.com/greenland-once-a-viking-paradise/

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THE “LITTLE ICE AGE” IMPACTED EUROPE WITH SUDDEN AND VICIOUS RESULTS! USING ITS WEAPONS, OF PLAGUE, FAMINE AND CONTROVERSIALLY EARTHQUAKE, IT REDUCED THE POPULATION OF EUROPE BY AROUND 30 – 50 PERCENT. THE VIRULENCE AND DEATH TOLL OF THE 1348 AD PLAGUE IS TOTALLY UNMATCHED BY MODERN EXAMPLES! FURTHER THE WORLD MEGA FAMINE OF 1315 AD, DUE TO BOTH WEATHER AND PESTILENCE, WAS CATASTROPHIC.


DOCUMENTATION OF CANNIBALISM AND INFANT ABANDONMENT WERE COMMON. THE RELENTLESS TEMPERATURE DROPS COMBINED WITH ERRATIC WEATHER ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO EXPLAIN BUT MANKIND HAD NO HAND IN ITS INCEPTION. WHAT FORCES OF NATURE CAUSED THIS CATASTROPHIC SCENARIO? GREENLAND IS A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF DEATH AND ABANDONMENT. LET’S TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND SEE WHAT HAPPENED!

Although the “Little Ice Age” is a scientific reconstruction it covers a period when there was a significant and chaotic down turn in climate, compared to the present era.


It is classified into four periods from around 1280 AD to 1850 AD . These erratic periods science records as the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and Dalton weather minima. This dramatic deterioration was not only cooler, wetter and windier on average but vastly more chaotic. These are prime ingredients for famine and curiously plague.

The “Little Ice Age” followed a period known as the “Medieval maximum” around 900AD – 1280 AD, which copious records reveal, was much warmer than modern times. For instance grapevines grew in the area of today’s shivering Wales! This was generally a period of prosperity for civilizations.


There was a large increase in world population and an era of colonial expansion. During the years 800 AD-1200 AD, Greenland and Iceland were settled by the Vikings. The “Medieval Warm Period” allowed this great migration to flourish. Drift ice at later dates posed the greatest hazard to sailors but reports of drift ice in old records do not appear until the thirteenth century.


http://www.mungoflix.com/mungoflix/2014/01/29/greenland-once-a-viking-paradise-d21/


GREENLAND WAS SETTLED WHEN ERIC ASVALDSSON WAS BANISHED FROM ICELAND FOR KILLING TWO MEN. HE CONVERTED HIS MISFORTUNE INTO THE FOUNDATION OF A NEW COLONY. THE INITIAL SETTLEMENT WAS ON A DEEP FIORD ON THE SOUTH-WESTERN COAST (NEXT TO TODAY’S ARCTIC CANADA). CONDITIONS WERE SIMILAR TO ICELAND, ITSELF THEN ENJOYING A WARM TEMPERATE CLIMATE. CHRONICLERS EVEN MENTION SWIMMING IN GREENLAND’S FJORDS! TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE TODAY.

THE BONES OF CATTLE, SHEEP, PIGS AND GOATS COLLECTED FROM ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES REVEAL THE EXISTENCE OF LARGE FARMS WITH LARGE PRODUCTIVE PASTURES IN WHAT IS NOW OFTEN SNOW COVERED WASTELAND.


ERIC DREW THOUSANDS TO THESE THREE NEW AREAS. THE GREENLAND VIKINGS LIVED MOSTLY ON DAIRY PRODUCE AND MEAT, PRIMARILY FROM COWS. BEFORE 1300 AD TRADE WITH EUROPEAN COUNTRIES WAS BRISK WITH MANY SHIPS PLYING TO AND FRO TRADING TIMBER, IRON, AND SALT, CORN IN EXCHANGE FOR FURS, SKINS, BUTTER, CHEESE AND WOOL. EXPANSION WAS IN FACT PROLIFIC ENOUGH FOR THE POPE TO SEND A BISHOP TO GREENLAND. TODAY ONLY RARE EARTH EXPORTS TO CHINA ARE VIABLE!


THE “MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD” PERIOD OF WARMER TIMES WITH A PREDICTABLE CLIMATE. CROPS FLOURISHED AND THE HUMAN RACE MULTIPLIED. GERMANY RECORDED VINEYARD GROWTH 700 FOOT HIGHER THAN AT PRESENT. TEMPERATURES AVERAGED 2 DEGREES CENTIGRADE WARMER THAN NOW. CHINA WAS 3 DEGREES CENTIGRADE WARMER. OUR WORLD WAS A DIFFERENT PLACE! IAN PLIMER USES EVIDENCE FROM TREE RING GROWTH, ICE CORES, SEDIMENT CORES, GLACIER RETRENCHMENT, SEA ICE REPORTS PLUS A WEALTH OF ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE!


THE “LITTLE ICE AGE” DRAMATICALLY CHANGED THIS PICTURE WITH THE GROWTH OF GLACIERS DOWN MOUNTAINS IN BOTH EUROPE AND CHINA. GROWTH OF SEA ICE, SEVERE AND PROLIFIC STORMS, HIGH RAINFALL AND COLDER ERRATIC CLIMATES BECAME RELENTLESS. THICK SEA ICE, 3 MILES WIDE, SOMETIMES BORDERED THE ENGLISH CHANNEL.


IT WAS A PERIOD WHEN MAJOR PLAGUES AND FAMINES RAVAGED THE WORLD. CHAOTIC WEATHER, I WILL ARGUE, ARE LARGELY DUE TO COSMIC INFLUENCES. THESE ARE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC FORCES! THIS OVERRIDING “HARMONIC” INFLUENCES SUNSPOTS, CMES, SOLAR FLARES, COMETS, PLANETS AND DRIVES THE SOLAR SYSTEM? CONSTANT CHANGE WITHIN THIS “HARMONIC”, NOT UNIFORMITY, IS THE NORM. WHAT WE SEE IN TODAY’S WORLD IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED IN OTHER ERAS.

These constantly changing cosmic influences caused WESTERN EUROPE TO EXPERIENCE A GENERAL COOLING OF THE CLIMATE BETWEEN THE YEARS 1150 AD AND 1460 AD AND EVEN COLDER CLIMATE BETWEEN 1560 AD AND 1850 AD.


DIRE CONSEQUENCES SHOCKED ITS PEOPLES. NOT ONLY WAS IT COLDER, WETTER AND WINDIER BUT NOTABLY ERRATIC AND OUT OF SEASON! THE COLDER WEATHER IMPACTED AGRICULTURE, HEALTH, ECONOMICS, SOCIAL STRIFE AND EMIGRATION! INCREASED GLACIATIONS, MULTIPLE SEVERE STORMS AND MAJOR FLOODS AND WINDS DEVASTATED SOCIETY! OLD SEA LOGS AND CITY RECORDS REVEAL ALL.


BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VIKINGS IN GREENLAND? BY THE YEAR 1300 AD MORE THAN 3,000 COLONISTS LIVED ON 300 FARMS SCATTERED ALONG THE WEST COAST OF GREENLAND. AROUND 1200 AD DRIFT ICE FORCED SHIPS FURTHER SOUTH TO REACH THE SETTLEMENTS!


ON THE SOUTH WEST COAST ALONGSIDE CANADA. In the 1300’s Bardsson wrote:

“FROM SNEFELSNESS IN ICELAND, TO GREENLAND, THE SHORTEST WAY: TWO DAYS AND THREE NIGHTS. SAILING DUE WEST. IN THE SEA THERE ARE REEFS CALLED GUNBIERNERSHIER. THAT WAS THE OLD ROUTE, BUT NOW THE ICE IS COME FROM THE NORTH, SO CLOSE TO THE REEFS THAT NONE CAN SAIL BY THE OLD ROUTE WITHOUT RISKING HIS LIFE.”


BY 1500 AD THE POPE COMPLAINED THAT NO BISHOP HAD BEEN ABLE TO VISIT GREENLAND FOR 80 YEARS ON ACCOUNT OF THE ICE. HIS GREENLAND CONGREGATION WAS ALREADY DEAD! THE GRAVES AND RUINS SHOW THAT THE COLD AND LACK OF NOURISHMENT TURNED THE AVERAGE GREENLANDER FROM THEIR 5’7″ TO A SEVERELY CRIPPLED, TWISTED AND DISEASED DWARF LIKE 5′ BY 1400 AD.

Both the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis put on dramatic displays when there is a coronal mass ejection. IN ADDITION BOTH PARKER AND LOCKWOOD WERE ABLE TO TIE SUNSPOT MAXIMA AND MINIMA INTO SOLAR LUMINOSITY AND ISOTOPE CONCENTRATIONS! THE SOLAR FLARE AND CME WHICH ATTENDED THE ” CARRINGTON EVENT” OF 1859 IS A GLARING EXAMPLE OF A MASSIVE SOLAR INUNDATION THAT WAS ACCOMPANIED BY THE WORST STORM OF THE 19TH CENTURY.


IT APPEARS THAT THE SUNSPOT ELEVEN YEAR CYCLE IS ALSO LINKED INTO THE SEVERITY OF HURRICANES AND DROUGHTS. THIS IS THE THINKING OF THE U.S NATIONAL CENTRE FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH (NCAR). BAKER FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND BELIEVES IT IS A VEHICLE TO PREDICT TIMES OF DROUGHT. HIS TRACKING OF SUNSPOTS SINCE RECORDS WERE KEPT IN 1876 AD SHOWS THAT SWITCHES IN THE SUN’S POLES AND MAGNETIC FIELD EVERY ELEVEN YEARS CONSISTENTLY EFFECT AUSTRALIA’S WEATHER.
COMPILATION OF SUNSPOT RECORDS, WHICH HAVE BEEN KEPT FOR FOUR CENTURIES, FIT IN WELL WITH TIMES OF DROUGHT.


AT TIMES OF PROSPERITY THE SUNSPOT ACTIVITY IS HIGH. GRAIN PRICES ARE LOW. AT LOW SUNSPOT ACTIVITY WE HAVE CROP FAILURE AND HIGH GRAIN PRICES. DROUGHT VARIES OVER A FULL TWENTY TWO YEAR CYCLE WITH AN ELEVEN YEAR MAXIMA TO MINIMA TURNAROUND TIME.
THERE MUST BE A FURTHER FACTOR THAT DRIVES THE WHOLE SUNSPOT CYCLE UP AND DOWN AND THIS IS WHAT CAUSES DEEPER AND COLDER MAXIMA AND MINIMA TO CAUSE A “LITTLE ICE AGE”. It demands a cosmic cause! Historian Jean de Venette wrote a curious piece that may provide a clue to this unsolved climate mystery:

THE ICELAND VIKINGS FARED LITTLE BETTER AS ITS POPULATION SHRUNK FROM 80,000 AROUND 1100 AD TO 38,000 BY 1850 AD AT THE END OF THE “LITTLE ICE AGE”! BY THE TIME COLUMBUS SET SAIL IN 1492 AD, GREENLAND WAS “DEAD” AND ICELAND WAS STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE.
THE “LITTLE ICE AGE” MINIMA WAS A HARSH REALITY. BUT WHAT WERE THE CAUSES? CERTAINLY NOT HIGHER CO2 LEVELS FROM MANKIND’S PUNY EFFORTS!


LET’S EXAMINE THE PART SUN SPOT MINIMA AND MAXIMA PLAY ON THE CLIMATE STAGE AS WE TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE EFFECT THESE CYCLES HAVE ON FAMINE AND PLAGUE. SUNSPOT ACTIVITY AND THEREFORE SOLAR FLUX ARE AN INGREDIENT IN CONTROLLING OUR CLIMATE. FLUX IS THE EMISSION OF VARIOUS POSITIVE IONS AND ELECTRONS EMITTED BY THE SUN THAT MEDIATE COSMIC RAYS AND THUS, AS HENRI SVENSMARK MAINTAINS, WEATHER AND PRECIPITATION. COSMIC RAYS INTERACT WITH THE EARTH’S MAGNETOSPHERE. THUS DRIER, WETTER, WINDIER AND HOTTER OR COLDER TIMES.


Both the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis put on dramatic displays when there is a coronal mass ejection. In addition Both Parker and Lockwood were able to tie sunspot maxima and minima into solar luminosity and isotope concentrations! THE SOLAR FLARE AND CME WHICH ATTENDED THE ” CARRINGTON EVENT” OF 1859 IS A GLARING EXAMPLE OF A MASSIVE SOLAR INUNDATION THAT WAS ACCOMPANIED BY THE WORST STORM OF THE 19TH CENTURY.
IT APPEARS THAT THE SUNSPOT ELEVEN YEAR CYCLE IS ALSO LINKED INTO THE SEVERITY OF HURRICANES AND DROUGHTS.


THIS IS THE THINKING OF THE U.S NATIONAL CENTRE FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH (NCAR). BAKER FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND BELIEVES IT IS A VEHICLE TO PREDICT TIMES OF DROUGHT.


HIS TRACKING OF SUNSPOTS SINCE RECORDS WERE KEPT IN 1876 AD SHOWS THAT SWITCHES IN THE SUN’S POLES AND MAGNETIC FIELD EVERY ELEVEN YEARS CONSISTENTLY EFFECT AUSTRALIA’S WEATHER.


COMPILATION OF SUNSPOT RECORDS, WHICH HAVE BEEN KEPT FOR FOUR CENTURIES, FIT IN WELL WITH TIMES OF DROUGHT. AT TIMES OF PROSPERITY THE SUNSPOT ACTIVITY IS HIGH. GRAIN PRICES ARE LOW. AT LOW SUNSPOT ACTIVITY WE HAVE CROP FAILURE AND HIGH GRAIN PRICES. DROUGHT VARIES OVER A FULL TWENTY TWO YEAR CYCLE WITH AN ELEVEN YEAR MAXIMA TO MINIMA TURNAROUND TIME.
THERE MUST BE A FURTHER FACTOR THAT DRIVES THE WHOLE SUNSPOT CYCLE UP AND DOWN AND THIS IS WHAT CAUSES DEEPER AND COLDER MAXIMA AND MINIMA TO CAUSE A “LITTLE ICE AGE”. IT DEMANDS A COSMIC CAUSE! Historian Jean de Venette wrote a curious piece that may provide a clue to this unsolved climate mystery:


“IN THE MONTH OF AUGUST, 1348 AD, AFTER VESPERS WHEN THE SUN WAS BEGINNING TO SET, A BIG AND VERY BRIGHT STAR APPEARED ABOVE PARIS, TOWARD THE WEST. IT DID NOT SEEM, AS STARS USUALLY DO, TO BE VERY HIGH ABOVE OUR HEMISPHERE BUT RATHER VERY NEAR. AS THE SUN SET AND NIGHT CAME ON, THIS STAR DID NOT SEEM TO ME OR TO MANY OTHER FRIARS WHO WERE WATCHING IT TO MOVE FROM ONE PLACE. AT LENGTH, WHEN NIGHT HAD COME, THIS BIG STAR, TO THE AMAZEMENT OF ALL OF US WHO WERE WATCHING, BROKE INTO MANY DIFFERENT RAYS AND, AS IT SHED THESE RAYS OVER PARIS TOWARD THE EAST, TOTALLY DISAPPEARED AND WAS COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED. WHETHER IT WAS A COMET OR NOT, WHETHER IT WAS COMPOSED OF AIRY EXHALATIONS AND WAS FINALLY RESOLVED INTO VAPOUR, I LEAVE TO THE DECISION OF ASTRONOMERS. IT IS, HOWEVER, POSSIBLE THAT IT WAS A PRESAGE OF THE AMAZING PESTILENCE TO COME, WHICH, IN FACT, FOLLOWED VERY SHORTLY IN PARIS AN THROUGHOUT FRANCE AND ELSEWHERE”.


Comets throughout history have been portrayed as predictors of doom. Bright comets are often, historically, in conjunction with plague, famine and earthquakes. Is this mere coincidence? The dramatic electrical discharge of comet shoemaker levy 9 as it split into 23 sections and assaulted Jupiter is a landmark in modern cosmology.

THE IMPACT OF SOME COMETS INTO THE SUN CAUSING INCREDIBLY LARGE CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS ( CMES) IS EQUALLY HARD TO EXPLAIN. COULD COMETS HAVE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC EFFECTS ON WEATHER, LIFE AND THE GEOLOGY OF THE EARTH. IT IS STILL A MYSTERY BUT ONE WE ARE GETTING CLOSER TO UNDERSTAND.
Peter Mungo Jupp

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The Little Ice Age tells the story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history, how this altered climate affected historical events, and what it means for today's global warming. Building on research that has only recently confirmed that the world endured a 500year cold snap, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan shows how the increasing cold influenced familiar events from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America to the Industrial Revolution. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in history, climate, and how they interact.

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"Climate change is the ignored player on the historical stage," writes archeologist Brian Fagan. But it shouldn't be, not if we know what's good for us. We can't judge what future climate change will mean unless we know something about its effects in the past: "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And Fagan's story of the last thousand years, centered on the "Little Ice Age," reminds us of what we could end up repeating: flood, fire, and famine--acts of God exacerbated by acts of man.


For all that he takes a broad--a very broad--view of European history, Fagan's writing is laced with human faces, fascinating anecdotes, and a gift for the telling detail that makes history live, very much in the style of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. When Fagan talks about the voyages of Basque fishermen to American shores (probably landing before Columbus sailed), he puts in the taste of dried cod and the terrifying suddenness of fogs on the Grand Banks. The Great Fire of London, what it was like when the Dutch dikes broke, the Irish Potato Famine, the year without a summer, ice fairs on the Thames, and volcanoes in the South Pacific--Fagan makes history a ripping yarn in which we are all actors, on a stage that has always been changing. --Mary Ellen Curtin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
The role of climatic change in human history remains open to question, due in large part to scant data. Fagan, professor of archeology at UC Santa Barbara, contributes substantively to the increasingly urgent debate. Contending with the dearth of accurate weather records from a few parts of the world, for little over a century Fagan (Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Ni?o and the Fate of Civilizations) draws discerning connections between an amazing array of disparate sources: ice cores, tree rings, archeological digs, tithing records that show dates of wine harvests, cloud types depicted in portraits and landscapes over time. He details human adaptation to meteorologic events for example, the way the Dutch, in the face of rising sea levels, engineered sea walls and thus increased their farmland by a third between the late 16th and early 19th centuries.


Explanations of phenomena like the North Atlantic Oscillation (which "governs... the rain that falls on Europe") lucidly advance Fagan's conviction that, though science cannot decide if the current 150-year warming trend (with one slight interruption) is part of a normal cycle, we should err on the side of caution. His study of the potential for widespread famine further bolsters his nonpartisan argument for a serious consideration of rapid climatic shifts. But Fagan doesn't proffer a sociopolitical polemic. He notes that we lack the political will to effect change, but refrains from speculating on future environmental policy. Illus. not seen by PW. (Mar. 1) Forecast: This topical book will appeal to fans of John McPhee, as well as to science and history scholars. With publicity targeted at the coasts (author tour in L.A., San Francisco and N.Y.; a talk at N.Y.'s Museum of Natural History), a forthcoming review in Discovery magazine and Fagan's enthusiastic readership, it should sell well.

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_The Little Ice Age_ by Brian Fagan is a fascinating, very readable, and well researched book on the science and history of a particular period of climatic history, the "Little Ice Age," which lasted approximately from 1300 to 1850. Despite the name, the Little Ice Age (a term coined by glacial geologist Francois Matthes in 1939, a term he used in a very informal way and without capitalized letters) was not a time of unrelenting cold.


Rather, it was an era of dramatic climatic shifts, cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds alternating with periods of heavy spring and early summer rains, mild winters, and frequent and often devastating Atlantic storms as well as periods of droughts, light northeasterly winds, and intense summer heat. The Little Ice Age was "an endless zigzag of climatic shifts," few lasting more than 25 years or so.

Nevertheless the climate of the time proved difficult and overall was uniformly cooler, often considerably so, than the time before and afterwards. The Little Ice Age was an era when there used to be winter fairs on the frozen River Thames during the time of King Charles II, one that produced the great gales that devastated the Spanish Armada in 1588, was when George Washington's Continental Army endured a brutal winter in Valley Forge in 1777-1778, when pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year, when Alpine glaciers destroyed villages and advanced kilometers from their present positions, when hundreds of poor died of hypothermia regularly every winter in London late into the 19th century.


It was also a time of massive rainy periods, such as the immense rains of 1315 and 1316 that helped stop the armies of French King Louis X from crushing the rebellious Flemings and produced an immense famine as crops couldn't survive the near unending rain.

Piecing together the climatic history of the Little Ice Age has been a challenge, one that required a multidisciplinary approach. Fagan recounted how reliable instrument records only go back a few centuries and then primarily only for Europe and North America.


Researchers have instead relied on information obtained from tree rings, ice cores, lake and marine bottom sediment cores, wine harvest records, analysis of the weather portrayed in art of the period, and anecdotal written records of country clergymen and gentleman scientists to piece together what the weather was like during the time period.

Although the causes of the Little Ice Age are not completely understood, much of it had to do with the actions of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a "seesaw" of atmospheric pressure between a persistent high over the Azores and an equally prevalent low over Iceland. Using charts and maps, Fagan showed how the NAO governs the position and strength of the North Atlantic storm track and thus Europe's rainfall.


The NAO index shows the constant shifts in the oscillation between these two areas, with a high NAO index indicating low pressure around Iceland and high pressure in the Azores, a condition producing westerly winds, powerful storms, more summer rains, mild winters, and dry conditions in southern Europe. A low NAO index signaled high pressure around Iceland, low pressure in the Azores, weaker westerlies, much colder winters, with cold air flowing from the north and east.


The exact reasons for the shifts in the NAO result from a complex interaction between sea-surface temperatures, the Gulf Stream, distribution of sea ice, and solar energy output. Additionally, several massive volcanic eruptions had an effect on the climate of the time, notably Soufriere on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines in 1814, and the titanic Tambora eruption in Indonesia in 1815 (the latter with one hundred times the ash output of Mount Saint Helens).

The author noted that placing the climatic events of the Little Ice Age in a proper context in terms of human history has been subject to some debate. Many archaeologists and historians are suspicious of environmental determinism, of the notion that climate change alone was the reason for such major developments as agriculture or a particular war.


However, others had felt that climate had played very little or no role in human history, and that Fagan completely rejects, primarily because throughout the Little Ice Age (even as late as the 19th century), millions of European peasants lived at the subsistence level, their survival dependent totally upon crop yields, generally what they themselves grew on land they owned or rented.


was centuries before even parts of Europe (at first the Netherlands and Britain) developed modern specialized commercial agriculture (with intensive farming and growing of nitrogen-enriching plants and animal fodder on previously fallow land) and reasonably reliable transportation networks to distribute food to larger areas. During most of Europe for the Little Ice Age, cycles of good and bad harvests, of cooler and wetter springs, meant the difference between hunger and plenty.


This sufficiency or insufficiency of food was a powerful motivator for human action. Fagan wrote that while environmental determinism may be "intellectually bankrupt," climate change is the "ignored player on the historical stage."

Fagan recounted several times when the climate of the Little Ice Age played an important role in the historical events of the time. For instance while Flanders and the Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and England in Stuart times really began to modernize agriculture, little innovation occurred in France, with late eighteenth century French agriculture very little different from medieval agriculture, leaving millions of poor farmers and city dwellers at the edge of starvation and at the mercy of the vagaries of climate.


While the decision to not modernize rested in the hands of the nobility (who were uninterested) and in the peasants (who were often deeply suspicious of change and wedded to tradition), it was the climatic events of the late eighteen century that lead to the awful harvest of 1788, the politicization of the rural poor, and the path to the French Revolution.

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Brian Fagan claims that "we can now track the Little Ice Age as an intricate tapestry of short-term climatic shifts that rippled through European society during times of remarkable change - seven centuries that saw Europe emerge from medieval fiefdom and pass by stages through the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, the French and Industrial revolutions, and the making of modern Europe."


The interesting question is to what extent did these climatic shifts alter the course of European history?
In some distinct cases, in my opinion, the answer is quite clear-cut. Norse settlement in Greenland, for example, became impossible because of the cooler temperatures after the 13th century.


Famine in rural areas throughout the Middle Ages was also an undisputed consequence of sudden weather shifts. The damage done to the Spanish Armada in 1588 by two savage storms is patently climatic in origin, too.


In most cases, however, the climate is just one - mostly minor - factor out of many that contributed to the occurrence of major historical events like the French Revolution, for example. Fagan rightly calls climatic change "a subtle catalyst." Finally, if we look at historical developments that unfolded over centuries - like the Renaissance or the making of modern Europe - the influence of the climate does not explain anything.


A book like Fagan's "The Little Ice Age" is most interesting for historians who examine grass roots history, such as the daily lives of farmers and fishermen in the Middle Ages.


At first I thought the climate would provide answers for economic historians, too. But as Fagan shows, the human response to deteriorating weather differs widely from region to region. The conservative French farmers stuck to growing wheat, which is notably intolerant of heavy rainfall, whereas English and Dutch farmers diversified their crop (and became much less vulnerable to bad weather).


The weather alone does not explain this development. Obviously, an economic historian who is interested in the question "why are people better off in this country (or region, society, etc.) than elsewhere?" has to look to other factors than the weather when he seeks for answers.


So far, the climate has been a footnote in World History. Nonetheless, this footnote can be quite interesting, as "The Little Ice Age" shows. The book is divided into four parts. Part One describes the Medieval Warm Period, roughly from 900 to 1200. Parts Two and Three describe how people reacted to the cooling weather, and how devastating climatic changes are for societies whose agriculture is at subsistence level. Part Four covers the end of the Little Ice Age and the sustained warming of modern times. All four parts make for fascinating, sometimes even disturbing reading; and for the reader new to the field Fagan offers the basic explanations of the effects of oceanic currents and air pressure on the climate in Europe.


Bottom line: A good introduction to the subject aimed at the general reading public. It largely exploits earlier literature on the subject, however. And while asking very broad questions, the book bases its answers on a narrow range of data mostly pertaining to northern Europe.

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There have been three great world pandemics of plague recorded, in 541, 1347, and 1894 CE, each time causing devastating mortality of people and animals across nations and continents. On more than one occasion plague irrevocably changed the social and economic fabric of society.

In most human plague epidemics, infection initially took the form of large purulent abscesses of lymph nodes, the bubo [L. bubo = ‘groin’, Gr. boubon = ‘swelling in the groin’], this was bubonic plague.


When bacteraemia followed, it caused haemorrhaging and necrosis of the skin rapidly followed by septicaemic shock and death, septicaemic plague. If the disease spread to the lung through the blood, it caused an invariably fatal pneumonia, pneumonic plague, and in that form plague was directly transmissible from person to person.

The three great plague pandemics had different geographic origins and paths of spread. The Justinian Plague of 541 started in central Africa and spread to Egypt and the Mediterranean. The Black Death of 1347 originated in Asia and spread to the Crimea then Europe and Russia. The third pandemic, that of 1894, originated in Yunnan, China, and spread to Hong Kong and India, then to the rest of the world.2

The causative organism, Yersinia pestis, was not discovered until the 1894 pandemic and was discovered in Hong Kong by a French Pastorien bacteriologist, Alexandre Yersin.


Four years later in 1898 his successor, Paul-Louis Simond, a fellow Asia and migrated westward on the sea routes from China and India. The brown rat flourished in Europe where there were open sewers and ample breeding grounds and food and in the 18th and 19th centuries replaced the black rat as the main disease host.4, 9

The primary vectors for transmission of the disease from rats to humans were the Oriental or Indian rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, and the Northern or European rat flea, Nosopsyllus fasciatus.


The human flea, Pulex irritans, and the dog and cat fleas, Ctenocephalides canis and felis, were secondary vectors. In the pandemics, the infected fleas were able to spread the plague over long distances as they were carried by rats and by humans travelling along trade routes at sea and overland, and also by infesting rice and wheat grain, clothing, and trade merchandise.


When infected, the proventriculus of the flea becomes blocked by a mass of bacteria. The flea continues to feed, biting with increasing frequency and agitation, and in an attempt to relieve the obstruction the flea regurgitates the accumulated blood together with a mass of Yersinia pestis bacilli directly into the bloodstream of the host.


The fleas multiply prolifically on their host and when the host dies they leave immediately, infesting new hosts and thus creating the foundations for an epidemic.10, 11

The Justinian Plague of 541-544

The first great pandemic of bubonic plague where people were recorded as suffering from the characteristic buboes and septicaemia was the Justinian Plague of 541 CE, named after Justinian I, the Roman emperor of the Byzantine Empire at the time.


The epidemic originated in Ethiopia in Africa and spread to Pelusium in Egypt in 540. It then spread west to Alexandria and east to Gaza, Jerusalem and Antioch, then was carried on ships on the sea trading routes to both sides of the Mediterranean, arriving in Constantinople [now Istanbul] in the autumn of 541.12, 13

The Byzantine court historian, Procopius of Caesarea, in his work History of the Wars, described people with fever, delirium and buboes He wrote that the epidemic was one ‘by which the whole human race came near to be annihilated’. Procopius wrote of the symptoms of the disease :

“ … with the majority it came about that they were seized by the disease without becoming aware of what was coming either through a waking vision or a dream.


… They had a sudden fever, some when just roused from sleep, others while walking about, and others while otherwise engaged, without any regard to what they were doing. And the body showed no change from its previous colour, nor was it hot as might be expected when attacked by a fever, nor indeed did any inflammation set in, but the fever was of such a languid sort from its commencement and up till evening that neither to the sick themselves nor to a physician who touched them would it afford any suspicion of danger.


It was natural, therefore, that not one of those who had contracted the disease expected to die from it. But on the same day in some cases, in others on the following day, and in the rest not many days later, a bubonic swelling developed; and this took place not only in the particular part of the body which is called boubon, that is, “below the abdomen,” but also inside the armpit, and in some cases also beside the ears, and at different points on the thighs.”14

The focus of the Justinian pandemic was Constantinople, reaching a peak in the spring of 542 with 5,000 deaths per day in the city, although some estimates vary to 10,000 per day, and it went on to kill over a third of the city’s population.


Victims were too numerous to be buried and were stacked high in the city’s churches and city wall towers, their Christian doctrine preventing their disposal by cremation.


Over the next three years plague raged through Italy, southern France, the Rhine valley and Iberia. The disease spread as far north as Denmark and west to Ireland, then further to Africa, the Middle East and Asia Minor. Between the years 542 and 546 epidemics in Asia, Africa and Europe killed nearly 100 million people.15, 16

The pandemic had a drastic effect and permanently changed the social fabric of the Western world. It contributed to the demise of Justinian’s reign.

Food production was severely disrupted and an eight year famine followed. The agrarian system of the empire was restructured to eventually become the three field feudal system.


The social and economic disruption caused by the pandemic marked the end of Roman rule and led to the birth of culturally distinctive societal groups that later formed the nations of medieval Europe.12

Further major outbreaks occurred throughout Europe and the Middle East over the next 200 years – in Constantinople in the years 573, 600, 698 and 747, in Iraq, Egypt and Syria in the years 669, 683, 698, 713, 732 and 750 and Mesopotamia in 686 and 704.


In 664 plague laid waste to Ireland, and in England it came to be known as the Plague of Cadwaladyr’s Time, after a Welsh king who contracted plague but survived it in 682. The plague continued in intermittent cycles in Europe into the mid-8th century and did not re-emerge as a major epidemic until the 14th century.

The ‘Black Death’ of Europe in 1347 to 1352

The Black Death of 1347 was the first major European outbreak of the second great plague pandemic that occurred over the 14th to 18th centuries. In 1346 it was known in the European seaports that a plague epidemic was present in the East.


In 1347 the plague was brought to the Crimea from Asia Minor by the Tartar armies of Khan Janibeg, who had laid siege to the town of Kaffa [now Feodosya in Ukraine], a Genoese trading town on the shores of the Black Sea.


The siege of the Tartars was unsuccessful and before they left, from a description by Gabriel de Mussis from Piacenza, in revenge they catapulted over the walls of Kaffa corpses of people who had died from the Black Death. In panic the Genoese traders fled in galleys with ‘sickness clinging to their bones’ to Constantinople and across the Mediterranean to Messina, Sicily, where the great pandemic of Europe started.


By 1348 it had reached Marseille, Paris and Germany, then Spain, England and Norway in 1349, and eastern Europe in 1350. The Tartars left Kaffa and carried the plague away with them spreading it further to Russia and India.17

A description of symptoms of the plague was given by Giovanni Boccaccio in 1348 in his book Decameron, a set of tales of a group of Florentines who secluded themselves in the country to escape the plague :

“.. in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or armpits. Some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavocciolo.


From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere,..“17

The term “Black Death” was not used until much later in history and in 1347 was simply known as “the pestilence” or “pestilentia”, and there are various explanations of the origin of the term. Butler [11] states the term refers to the haemorrhagic purpura and ischaemic gangrene of the limbs that sometimes ensued from the septicaemia. Ziegler17 states it derives from the translation of the Latin pestis atra or atra mors, ‘atra’ meaning ‘terrible’ or ‘dreadful’, the connotation of which was ‘black’, and ‘mors’ meaning ‘death’, and so ‘atra mors’ was translated as meaning ‘black death’.

The social impacts of the Black Death in Europe during the 14th century

The overall mortality rate varied from city to city, but in places such as Florence as observed by Boccaccio up to half the population died, the Italians calling the epidemic the mortalega grande, ‘the great mortality’. [18]


People died with such rapidity that proper burial or cremation could not occur, corpses were thrown into large pits and putrefying bodies lay in their homes and in the streets. People were as much afraid they would suffer a spiritual death as they were a physical death since there were no clergy to perform burial rites:

“Shrift there was none; churches and chapels were open, but neither priest nor penitents entered – all went to the charnelhouse. The sexton and the physician were cast into the same deep and wide grave; the testator and his heirs and executors were hurled from the same cart into the same hole together.”18

Transmission of the disease was thought to be by miasmas, disease carrying vapours emanating from corpses and putrescent matter or from the breath of an infected or sick person. Others thought the Black Death was punishment from God for their sins and immoral behaviour, or was due to astrological and natural phenomena such as earthquakes, comets, and conjunctions of the planets.


People turned to patron saints such as St Roch and St Sebastian or to the Virgin Mary, or joined processions of flagellants whipping themselves with nail embedded scourges and incanting hymns and prayers as they passed from town to town.17, 19, 20

“When the flagellants – they were also called cross brethren and cross bearers – entered a town, a borough or a village in a procession their entry was accompanied by the pealing of bells, singing, and a huge crowd of people. As they always marched two abreast, the procession of the numerous penitents reached farther than the eye could see.” [20]

The only remedies were inhalation of aromatic vapours from flowers and herbs such as rose, theriaca, aloe, thyme and camphor. Soon there was a shortage of doctors which led to a proliferation of quacks selling useless cures and amulets and other adornments that claimed to offer magical protection.

In this second pandemic, plague again caused great social and economic upheaval. Often whole families were wiped out and villages abandoned. Crops could not be harvested, travelling and trade became curtailed, and food and manufactured goods became short.


As there was a shortage of labour, surviving villager labourers, the ‘villeins’, extorted exorbitant wages from the remaining aristocratic landowners. The villeins prospered and acquired land and property.


The plague broke down the normal divisions between the upper and lower classes and led to the emergence of a new middle class.17, 9 The plague lead to a preoccupation with death as evident from macabre artworks such as the ‘Triumph of Death’ by Pieter Breughel the Elder in 1562, which depicted in a panoramic landscape armies of skeletons killing people of all social orders from peasants to kings and cardinals in a variety of macabre and cruel ways.

In the period 1347 to 1350 the Black Death killed a quarter of the population in Europe, over 25 million people, and another 25 million in Asia and Africa.[15]


Mortality was even higher in cities such as Florence, Venice and Paris where more than half succumbed to the plague. A second major epidemic occurred in 1361, the pestis secunda, in which 10 to 20% of Europe’s population died.13


Other virulent infectious disease epidemics with high mortalities occurred during this time such as smallpox, infantile diarrhoea and dysentery. By 1430, Europe’s population was lower than it had been in 1290 and would not recover the pre-pandemic level until the 16th century.13, 21

Quarantine

In 1374 when another epidemic of the Black Death re-emerged in Europe, Venice instituted various public health controls such as isolating victims from healthy people and preventing ships with disease from landing at port.


In 1377 the republic of Ragusa on the Adriatic Sea [now Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia] established a ships’ landing station far from the city and harbour in which travellers suspected to have the plague had to spend thirty days, the trentena, to see whether they became ill and died or whether they remained healthy and could leave.


The trentena was found to be too short and in 1403 in Venice, travellers from the Levant in the eastern Mediterranean were isolated in a hospital for forty days, the quarantena or quaranta giorni, from which we derive the term quarantine.8,18


This change to forty days may have also been related to other biblical and historical references such as the Christian observance of Lent, the period for which Christ fasted in the desert, or the ancient Greek doctrine of “critical days” which held that contagious disease will develop within 40 days after exposure.22


In the 14th and 15th centuries following, most countries in Europe had established quarantine, and in the 18th century Habsburg established a cordon sanitaire, a line between infected and clean parts of the continent which ran from the Danube to the Balkans. It was manned by local peasants with checkpoints and quarantine stations to prevent infected people from crossing from eastern to western Europe.8

The leather costume of the plague doctors at Nijmegen

In the 15th and 16th centuries doctors wore a peculiar costume to protect themselves from the plague when they attended infected patients, first illustrated in a drawing by Paulus Furst in 1656 and later Jean-Jacques described a similar costume worn by the plague doctors at Nijmegen, an old Dutch town in Gelderland, in his 1721 work Treatise on the Plague.


They wore a protective garb head to foot with leather or oil cloth robes, leggings, gloves and hood, a wide brimmed hat which denoted their medical profession, and a beak like mask with glass eyes and two breathing nostrils which was filled with aromatic herbs and flowers to ward off the miasmas.


They avoided contact with patients by taking their pulse with a stick or issued prescriptions for aromatic herb inhalations passing them through the door, and buboes were lanced with knives several feet long.19

The Great Plague of London of 1665 to 1666

Plague continued to occur in small epidemics throughout the world but a major outbreak of the pneumonic plague occurred in Europe and England in 1665 to 1666.


The epidemic was described by Samuel Pepys in his diaries in 1665 and by Daniel Defoe in 1722 in his A Journal of a Plague Year. People were incarcerated in their homes, doors painted with a cross.


The epidemic reached a peak in September 1665 when 7,000 people per week were dying in London alone. Between 1665 and 1666 a fifth of London’s population died, some 100,000 people.[17]


The Great Fire of London in 1666 and the subsequent rebuilding of timber and thatch houses with brick and tile disturbed the rats’ normal habitat and led to a reduction in their numbers, and may have been a contributing factor to the end of the epidemic.9

An old English nursery rhyme published in Kate Greenaway’s book Mother Goose 1881 reminds us of the symptoms of the plague :

‘Ring, a-ring, o’rosies, [a red blistery rash]

A pocket full of posies [fragrant herbs and flowers to ward off the ‘miasmas’]

Atishoo, atishoo [the sneeze and the cough heralding pneumonia]

We all fall down.’ [all dead]

Plague waxed and waned in Europe until the late 18th century, but not with the virulence and mortality of the 14th century European Black Death.

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A killer plague

Between 430 and 426 BC, Athens suffered outbreaks of a terrible plague, which killed almost a third of the population. Scientists now believe that the plague may have arrived in Athens by ships from North Africa. The city was very overcrowded because of the Peloponnesian War and this meant the plague spread quickly.

At the time no one was sure why the plague was happening. People in Athens had different opinions as to what had caused the mysterious disease - and what might cure it.

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In 430 BC, a plague struck the city of Athens, which was then under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War [431-404 BC]. In the next 3 years, most of the population was infected, and perhaps as many as 75,000 to 100,000 people, 25% of the city's population, died.


The Athenian general and historian Thucydides left an eye-witness account of this plague and a detailed description to allow future generations to identify the disease should it break out again.


Because of the importance of Thucydides and Athens in Western history and culture, the Plague of Athens has taken a prominent position in the history of the West for the past 2500 years. Despite Thucydides' careful description, in the past 100 years, scholars and physicians have disagreed about the identification of the disease.


Based on clinical symptoms, 2 diagnoses have dominated the modern literature on the Athenian plague: smallpox and typhus. New methodologies, including forensic anthropology, demography, epidemiology, and paleopathogy, including DNA analysis, have shed new light on the problem. Mathematical modeling has allowed the examination of the infection and attack rates and the determination of how long it takes a disease to spread in a city and how long it remains endemic.


The highly contagious epidemic exhibited a pustular rash, high fever, and diarrhea. Originating in Ethiopia, it spread throughout the Mediterranean.


It spared no segment of the population, including the statesman Pericles. The epidemic broke in early May 430 BC, with another wave in the summer of 428 BC and in the winter of 427-426 BC, and lasted 4.5 to 5 years. Thucydides portrays a virgin soil epidemic with a high attack rate and an unvarying course in persons of different ages, sexes, and nationalities.


The epidemiological analysis excludes common source diseases and most respiratory diseases. The plague can be limited to either a reservoir diseases [zoonotic or vector-borne] or one of the respiratory diseases associated with an unusual means of persistence, either environmental/fomite persistence or adaptation to indolent transmission among dispersed rural populations.


The first category includes typhus, arboviral diseases, and plague, and the second category includes smallpox. Both measles and explosive streptococcal disease appear to be much less likely candidates.


In 2001, a mass grave was discovered that belonged to the plague years. Ancient microbial typhoid [Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi] DNA was extracted from 3 skeletons. Because typhoid was endemic in the Greek world, it is not the likely cause of this sudden epidemic. Mt Sinai J Med 76:456-467, 2009. [c] 2009 Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

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The featured image of the Wikipedia page for the Black Death is a gif showing the spread of the bubonic plague throughout Europe. There are a few places where the plague never spread to, including the area around Milan. But most notably, the entire Kingdom of Poland is spared, even as virtually every other region is infected.


The Wikipedia page itself just says the following:

The plague spared some parts of Europe, including the Kingdom of Poland, the majority of the Basque Country and isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands.

But it never gives an explanation why Poland would be spared. Was Poland just lucky, or was something else at play?[Quote]


[quote]
Your map is misleading. The black death was an urban syndrome. People living in rural circumstances were not affected nearly so much. I know the average monk writing about it thought cities and towns were the whole world, but believe or not, farmers are people too. – Tyler Durden Oct 20 '14 at 1:08

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Poland wasn't actually "spared", it was merely less affected than the rest of Europe. That graphic is incorrect [or rather, incomplete], since a substantial number of both Poland and Milan's population did in fact die of the plague. Their death rates were only "low" in comparison to the rest of Europe - if it happened today, it would be horrifying to us.

Poland lost about a quarter of its population to the plague...Milan's death rate was less than 15%, probably the lowest in Italy save a few Alpine villages.

- Gottfried, Robert S. Black Death. New York: The Free Press, 1983.
Nonetheless, it is true that Poland did survive the Black Death relatively unscathed. In addition to Poland's relatively sparse population, a key factor is that King Casimir the Great wisely quarantined the Polish borders. By holding the plague off at the borders, the disease's impact on Poland was softened.

During Kazimierz's reign, the Black Death, a pandemic infection, swept across Europe, killing millions. But Poland established quarantines at its borders, and the plague skirted Poland almost entirely.

- Zuchora-Walske, Christine, Poland, North Mankato: ABDO Publishing, 2013.
The quarantine's effectiveness was further enhanced by Poland's relative isolation. While heavily hit regions such as the Mediterranean coast were densely interlinked with trade, the same was generally not true of Poland. When the Black Death arrived, this isolation helped insulate the Poles from the plague.

[M]uch larger areas, such as central Poland ... locations 'off the beaten trail' and not along the more popular trade routes were more likely to be on the lookout for ill travelers, 'foreigners', or perhaps not even be visited by outsiders at all. We believe that it was the exclusion of medieval traders and pilgrims that would significantly account for the lightly-affected Medieval Black Death regions

- Welford, Mark, and Brian H. Bossak. "Revisiting the Medieval Black Death of 1347–1351: Spatiotemporal Dynamics Suggestive of an Alternate Causation." Geography Compass 4.6 [2010]: 561-575.


Additionally, it has often been claimed that that Poland fared better due to having fewer rats. Two popular explanations offered for this theory is that Poland had more cats, or alternatively less food for rats.

The absence of plague in Bohemia and Poland is commonly explained by the rats' avoidance of these areas due to the unavailability of food the rodents found palatable.

- Cantor, Norman F. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
It is, however, more likely that the local climate was simply less conductive to the plague's spread.

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There are three types of plague, Pneumonic, Bubonic, and Septicemic all of which are caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. People infected by fleas get the bubonic form of the plague. However, if the bacteria reaches the lungs, it becomes pneumonic plague which is more virulent spreading via person to person by coughing then no rats are needed since the virus becomes airborne

Quite a lot of scientists now think that the plague was in fact airborne and not spread by rats, but by infected people with the Pneumonic form of the plague. This version spreads much faster and kills quicker. Thankfully antibiotics can today prevent the disease from becoming pneumonic [air-born]

Yersinia pestis can survive for at least 24 days in contaminated soil Up to 5 days on other materials link

The travel times and relative isolation were probably enough to stop most of the spread [explained in comments below] ... Considering peasants were not allowed to travel in those days, most likely the plague was spread by traders, this is why the more dense populations were more affected.

With more remote populations kept safe especially since it could kill within 24 hrs of catching it probably those infected died before reaching their destination.

So to help get an idea of travel times: how the distances saved the population I’ve used this map - old travel routes of Europe





so for instance Prague to Krakow [240 miles on google maps] on horse would be 8 days travel [assuming that the roads are flat and that the modern road follows the same path of the medieval trade route. With a wagon pulled by horse 15 - 25 miles/day takes 9.6 - 16 days.]


With a wagon pulled by oxen 10 - 12 miles/day takes 24 - 20 days [most people who were infected with the plague died within 24-72 hrs so it becomes easy to see that most would die on the way before reaching the more dense populations.]


its not so surprising small towns were least effected,People travelled to trade in the big cities, no one travelled for fun. Travel was very hard for any distance. People could only travel by foot, horse, boat or wagon.


To go any distance took a long time. For instance to travel 30 miles by horse took 3 days one way on flat ground, so I suppose you could draw a line in on a map, look at the radius that a person could travel in the amount of time that a virus could survive outside a host Polands size and isolation most likely saved it. – Natalie Oct 20 '14 at 18:57

Mortality continued to rise throughout the bitterly cold winter, when fleas could not have survived, and there is no evidence of enough rats. Black rat skeletons have been found at 14th-century sites, but not in high enough numbers to make them the plague carriers, he said.


In sites beside the Thames, where most of the city's rubbish was dumped and rats should have swarmed, and where the sodden ground preserves organic remains excellently, few black rats have been

found.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/17/black-death-rats-off-hook – Natalie Oct 20 '14 at 20:29

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One factor to consider also is that Poland had a much smaller population than western Europe. Around the time of the black death, the polish population was something like 2-3 million, while the French population was about 14 Millon or even higher. It's common sense that disease spreads easier in higher population density areas, especially when hygiene was poor like in the middle ages.

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[All of the quotes above are from the same websource that I linked to above the first quote BTW].

Now back then Poland was a kingdom, when the Black death broke, a country located in North-east Europe that encompassed major areas of the steppes of Eastern-North-East Europe and it had a coastline to the Baltic sea; which is a big inland lake located in Northern Europe:



Now as I said, the entire Northern European regional BELT DID NOT SUFFER MAJOR CASUALTIES OR LOSSES DURING THE OUTBREAK OF PANDEMICS AND PLAGUE OUTBREAKS LIKE THE BLACK DEATH AND ANCIENT PLAGUES THAT TOOK PLACE DURING THE GREEK ERA AND THE PLAGUES THAT HIT THE BYZANTINE ROMAN EMPIRE!

As stated above, VARIOUS REASONS WHY THE ABOVE SCENARIO TOOK PLACE, INCLUDE THE FACT THAT THE NORTHERN EUROPEAN REGION, DID NOT HAVE MANY MAJOR CITIES AND TOWNS, AND HIGH CONCENTRATIONS OF PEOPLE WITHIN PARTICULAR ZONES!


And because Northern Europe, WAS ISOLATED FROM THE MAJOR POPULATION CENTERS AND CIVILIZATIONS OF SOUTHERN EUROPE [like the Greco-Roman civilizations]; WHICH GOES BACK ALL THE WAY TO THE ANCIENT PERIOD IN EUROPE, WHEN MAJOR PLAGUE OUTBREAKS OCCURRED IN EUROPE DURING THE ANCIENT TO MIDDLE AGES PERIOD; Northern Europe, where the vast majority of Ancient White Indo-European settled in BEFORE THEY MIGRATED TO THE OTHER PARTS OF EUROPE, was SPARED FROM MAJOR PLAGUE AND VIRAL OUTBREAKS AND THEIR RESULTANT DEVASTATION!


The Northern European region DID NOT SUFFER from HIGH LOSSES IN POPULATIONS AND CASUALTY RATES WHEN VIRAL AND PLAGUE OUTBREAKS STRUCK MAJOR EUROPEAN POPULATION CENTERS DURING THE ANCIENT TO MIDDLE AGES PERIOD!

HOWEVER, Northern Europe and the Northern European regions, particularly around the Baltic and North seas; WERE THE AREAS WHERE ANCIENT WHITE INDO-EUROPEANS MASS MIGRATED AND SETTLED TO FIRST, WHEN THEY MIGRATED TO EUROPE FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPES!

Before White European tribes like the Germanics, Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Suebians, Heruls, Gepids, Vandals, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, Geats etc etc MASS MIGRATED THROUGHOUT EUROPE DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD, DURING THE MIDDLE AGES/DARK AGES AND THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE PERIOD, TO SETTLE THROUGHOUT THE REST OF EUROPE FROM SCANDINAVIA, THEY WERE ALL SETTLED IN AND THEY INHABITED THE REGION OF NORTHERN EUROPE.

NOT SOUTHERN EUROPE WHERE MOST OF THE EARLY ADVANCED CIVILIZATIONS AND HIGH POPULATION DENSITY CITIES OF EUROPE WERE LOCATED IN DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD OF WHITES LIKE GERMANICS DURING THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND MIDDLE AGES; BUT NORTHERN EUROPE WHICH DID NOT HAVE ANY MAJOR CITIES AND TOWNS UNLIKE SOUTHERN EUROPE DURING ANCIENT TIMES!

This is why regions like Poland were SPARED AND AVOIDED THE MAJOR HIGH MASS CASUALTY RATES AND LOSSES IN POPULATION NUMBERS, DUE TO PLAGUE OUTBREAKS LIKE THE BLACK DEATH AND OTHER PREVIOUS PLAGUES THAT STRUCK EARLY EUROPE!

Because Northern Europe was relatively isolated, did not have major infrastructure or cities or towns or urban centers with HIGH densities of populations UNLIKE SOUTHERN EUROPE!


And Northern Europe was where the vast majority of White Indo-Europeans lived in, BEFORE THEY MASS MIGRATED AND PROLIFERATED THROUGHOUT THE REST OF EUROPE, DURING THE GREAT PEOPLES MIGRATION MOVEMENT OF WHITE INDO-EUROPEANS, LIKE THE GERMANIC/GOTHIC TRIBES THROUGHOUT EUROPE, DURING THE START OF THE DARK AGES AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE PERIOD!


Now for proof of above, take a look at this:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goths

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[b]
The Roman historian Jordanes provides an important source of knowledge of the Goths in his Getica, a semi-fictional account written in the 6th century. Jordanes describes the migration of the Goths from southern Scandza [Scandinavia], into Gothiscandza – believed to be the lower Vistula region in modern Pomerania – and from there to the coast of the Black Sea.


Archaeological evidence from the Pomeranian Wielbark culture and the Chernyakhov culture, northeast of the lower Danube, confirms that some such migration did in fact take place. In the 3rd century the Goths crossed either the lower Danube or the Black Sea, ravaged the Balkans and Anatolia as far as Cyprus, and sacked Athens, Byzantium, and Sparta.[3]


By the 4th century the Goths had captured Dacia[4][5] and divided into at least two distinct groups separated by the Dniester River: the Thervingi [led by the Balti dynasty] and the Greuthungi [led by the Amali dynasty].




"The expansion of the Germanic tribes 750 BC – AD 1, after the Penguin Atlas of World History 1988"


According to Jordanes' Getica, written in the mid-6th century, the earliest migrating Goths sailed from Scandza [Scandinavia] under King Berig[20] in three ships[21] and named the place at which they landed after themselves: "Today [says Jordanes] it is called Gothiscandza" ["Scandza of the Goths"].[22]


Although the exact location of Gothiscandza is unclear, Jordanes tells us that one shipload "dwelled in the province of Spesis on an island surrounded by the shallow waters of the Vistula."[23] From there, the Goths then moved into an area along the southern coast of the Baltic Sea which was inhabited by the "Ulmerugi" [Rugii], expelled them,[24] and also subdued the neighboring Vandals.


According to the Gallaecian Christian priest, historian and theologian Paulus Orosius, the Goths were of the same stock as the Suiones ["Swedes"], the Vandals and the other tribes of Scandinavia.[25]

The Goths, according to Isidore of Seville, were descended from Gog and Magog, and of the same race as the Getae.[26][27]


According to Tacitus, the Goths and the neighboring Rugii and Lemovii carried round shields and short swords, and obeyed their regular authority.


[24][28][29]
Pliny[30] recounts a report of Pytheas, an explorer who visited Northern Europe in the 4th century BC., that the "Gutones, a people of Germany," inhabit the shores of an estuary of at least 6,000 stadia called Mentonomon [i.e., the Baltic Sea], where amber is cast up by the waves. Lehmann [cited in the section on Etymology, above] accepts this, although one version of Pliny's manuscript uses the word "Guiones" instead of "Gutones."[31]


In Pliny's only other mention of the Gutones,[32] he states that the Vandals are one of the five races of Germany, and that the Vandals comprise four distinct groups, the Burgodiones, the Varinnae, the Charini and the Gutones.


He does not specify where the Vandals lived, but his description is consistent with his contemporary Ptolemy's description of the east Germanic tribes.[33] Since we have only Pliny's report of what Pytheas said about the Gutones, and not Pytheas's report itself, the 4th century BC date is unconfirmed, but not necessarily invalid.


The earliest known material culture associated with the Goths on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea is the Wielbark culture,[34] centered on the modern region of Pomerania in northern Poland. This culture replaced the local Oksywie or Oxhöft culture in the 1st century, when a Scandinavian settlement was established in a buffer zone between the Oksywie culture and the Przeworsk culture.[35]


The culture of this area was influenced by southern Scandinavian culture beginning as early as the late Nordic Bronze Age and early Pre-Roman Iron Age [c. 1300 – c. 300 BC].[36] In fact, the Scandinavian influence on Pomerania and today's northern Poland from c. 1300 BC [period III] and onwards was so considerable that some see the culture of the region as part of the Nordic Bronze Age culture.[37]


The Goths are believed to have crossed the Baltic Sea sometime between the end of this period [ca 300 BC] and AD 100. Early archaeological evidence in the traditional Swedish province of Östergötland suggests a general depopulation during this period.[38]


However, this is not confirmed in more recent publications.[39] The settlement in today's Poland may correspond to the introduction of Scandinavian burial traditions, such as the stone circles and the stelae especially common on the island of Gotland and other parts of southern Sweden.

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Malaria and the Fall of Rome
By Andrew Thompson
Last updated 2011-02-17



Could an ancient children's burial ground contain clues about how one of the world's greatest empires came to an end? Andrew Thompson explores the theory that malaria was the silent killer responsible for the fall of Rome.

ROMAN FEVER

TODAY IN THE WEST, MOST PEOPLE HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW DEADLY MALARIA USED TO BE, ALTHOUGH THERE WERE SERIOUS MALARIAL EPIDEMICS IN MANY PARTS OF ITALY AS RECENTLY AS THE 1950S. BUT EACH YEAR, MAINLY IN AFRICA, IT STILL KILLS OVER TWO MILLION PEOPLE, MOST OF THEM CHILDREN. WHILE THERE ARE SEVERAL MENTIONS OF A DISEASE SOUNDING VERY SIMILAR TO MALARIA IN HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS FROM ROMAN TIMES, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY HARD EVIDENCE OF ITS PRESENCE.

...THE MOST DANGEROUS TYPE OF MALARIA WAS A KILLER IN IMPERIAL ROME.


BUT LAST YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME, A BRITISH SCIENTIST PROVED CONCLUSIVELY THAT THE MOST DANGEROUS TYPE OF MALARIA WAS A KILLER IN IMPERIAL ROME. THE SCIENTIST RELIED ON THE LATEST DNA TECHNIQUES THAT ARE REVOLUTIONIZING THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE ROLE OF DISEASE IN ANCIENT TIMES. THE MALARIAL DNA FROM A ROMAN SITE, DATING FROM AROUND AD 450, IS THE OLDEST DEFINITE EVIDENCE OF MALARIA IN HISTORY. THE FINDING OF MALARIA WAS A REMARKABLE AND COMPLICATED PIECE OF DETECTIVE WORK, WHICH SPANNED THE LAST TEN YEARS.


At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland in the northern hemisphere to the deserts of Africa in the south. The empire lasted for over 500 years, although its eastern part, the Byzantine Empire, lasted for several more centuries. When the empire collapsed, hordes of barbarian armies, including the infamous Vandal pirates, invaded Italy throughout the fifth century AD. Rome was transformed from a bustling city of millions to a provincial town of a few thousand, surrounded by swamps. The anarchy of the Dark Ages had begun.


ALTHOUGH THERE HAS BEEN NO SHORTAGE OF THEORIES, IT HAS NEVER BEEN CLEAR WHY ROME BECAME SO VULNERABLE TO FOREIGN INVADERS AT THIS TIME. POLITICAL INSTABILITY, THE COLLAPSE OF FOOD SUPPLIES TO ROME, AND EVEN THE INFAMOUS LEAD IN THE WATER SUPPLIES HAVE ALL BEEN IMPLICATED. HISTORIANS HAVE GENERALLY AGREED THAT ROME'S DOWNFALL WAS DUE TO A COMBINATION OF MANY FACTORS.




ONE ELEMENT THAT HAS LARGELY BEEN IGNORED BY RESEARCHERS IS THE ROLE OF DISEASE AND EPIDEMICS IN CONTRIBUTING TO THE FALL OF ROME. DAVID SOREN IS THE AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST BEHIND THE NEW THEORY THAT MALARIA PLAYED A KEY PART. HE IS AN EXPERT ON ROMAN ANTIQUITY, HAVING DUG AT SEVERAL SITES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AREA. TEN YEARS AGO HE WAS INVITED TO A BEAUTIFUL HILL TOWN CALLED LUGNANO (JUST NORTH OF ROME) BY LOCAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS. THEY WANTED SOREN TO HELP THEM EXCAVATE THE REMAINS OF A ROMAN VILLA OUTSIDE THE TOWN.


At first Soren thought it would be a fairly straightforward excavation. But it wasn't long before he came across something totally unexpected. In the store rooms at the back of the villa he and his team found the skeleton of a baby, buried in a pottery storage jar (an 'amphora'). That same day his team found seven more child skeletons, and soon more and more babies were being uncovered. In the end Soren and his team excavated 47 children. The oldest was just three years old, most were much younger: over half had died in the womb. It is the largest children's cemetery ever found from Roman times. But the large number of children was not the most unusual thing about the site.

As they uncovered the babies the archaeologists began to find the remains of puppies. It soon became clear that these puppies had been sacrificed, they had literally been torn apart and then placed in the grave as part of the burial ritual. Most of them had been decapitated. There were also signs of burnt plant offerings.

All this was a puzzle to David Soren, because at the time of the burials most of the citizens of the Roman Empire were ostensibly Christian. Soren believed that whatever it was that was killing the children must have been so terrible that the parents were afraid of it. That was perhaps why the villagers had rejected Christianity and reverted to pagan practices.



"Pottery storage jars found at Lugnano"


A DEADLY EPIDEMIC

OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS SOREN PIECED TOGETHER ALL THE EVIDENCE THAT MIGHT HELP TO EXPLAIN WHAT THE VILLAGERS WERE SO AFRAID OF. FROM CAREFUL EXCAVATIONS OF THE SITE HE KNEW THAT ALL THE BABIES HAD BEEN BURIED OVER A VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME, PROBABLY JUST A FEW MONTHS AT MOST.


SOME OF THE BONES OF THE CHILDREN SHOWED EVIDENCE OF SOME TYPE OF BLOOD DISEASE. AND MANY OF THE PLANT OFFERINGS WERE OF HONEYSUCKLE, A PLANT COMMONLY USED IN THE TREATMENT OF FEVERS BY THE ROMANS. SOREN BELIEVED IT WAS A DEADLY EPIDEMIC, AND MOST LIKELY MALARIA. ROMAN WRITERS IN THE AREA OF LUGNANO HAD SPECIFICALLY MENTIONED THAT THERE WAS A ZONE OF PESTILENCE IN THIS REGION AND THAT PEOPLE DIED OF FEVERS.

SOREN'S MOST IMPORTANT ALLY IN ITALY WAS ONE OF THE WORLD'S LEADING EXPERTS ON MALARIAL MOSQUITOES - PROFESSOR MARIO COLUZZI OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ROME. INDEPENDENTLY OF SOREN'S WORK, HE HAD BEEN INVESTIGATING THE SPREAD OF MALARIA OUT OF AFRICA AND INTO ITALY AND THE REST OF SOUTHERN EUROPE.


COLUZZI BELIEVED THAT MALARIA WAS NOT A PROBLEM AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, BUT HAD BECOME INCREASINGLY SERIOUS AS THE EMPIRE DECLINED. IT IS KNOWN THAT MALARIA ORIGINATED IN CENTRAL AFRICA AND THEN SPREAD NORTH. COLUZZI WAS MOST INTERESTED IN WORKING OUT WHEN IT FIRST ARRIVED IN ITALY, AND HOW IT GOT THERE.

WIDESPREAD TRADE


KEY TO COLUZZI'S IDEAS WAS THE THRIVING TRADE THROUGHOUT THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION DURING ROMAN TIMES. COLUZZI BELIEVES THAT ONE WAY THE MALARIA REACHED MAINLAND ITALY WAS BY CARGO SHIP. PASSENGERS ON THE BOATS COULD BE CARRYING THE MALARIA IN THEIR BLOODSTREAM EVEN BEFORE SHOWING SYMPTOMS. THE WATER BARREL ON BOARD COULD CONTAIN MOSQUITO LARVAE.
There is now more and more archaeological evidence of widespread trade. Last year, at the ancient harbour of Olbia on the island of Sardinia, 16 Roman cargo ships were found buried in the mud.


THEY WERE EXTREMELY WELL PRESERVED, MANY OF THEM STILL HAD THEIR WOODEN DECKING INTACT, AND THEY HAVE NOW BEEN CAREFULLY EXCAVATED. POTTERY ON BOARD WAS FURTHER PROOF OF TRADE BETWEEN NORTH AFRICA AND ROME. SARDINIA WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY A STEPPING STONE FOR THE MALARIA PARASITE, BEFORE IT REACHED MAINLAND ITALY. COLUZZI'S RESEARCH INDICATES THAT THE MOST SERIOUS TYPE OF MALARIA (KNOWN AS PLASMODIUM FALCIPARUM) REACHED ROME AT ABOUT THE TIME OF CHRIST.

EVEN THOUGH COLUZZI'S WORK DOVETAILED NICELY WITH SOREN'S THEORY ABOUT THE CHILDREN OF LUGNANO, MOST ARCHAEOLOGISTS, ESPECIALLY IN THE UNITED STATES, WERE EXTREMELY SCEPTICAL OF THE MALARIA HYPOTHESIS. SOREN RECEIVED HUGE AMOUNTS OF CRITICISM FROM FELLOW ARCHAEOLOGISTS, WHO ARGUED THAT THE INFANT BURIALS MAY HAVE HAPPENED OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME, AND THAT EVEN IF IT WAS AN EPIDEMIC IT WAS LIKELY TO BE SOME OTHER DISEASE. ALTHOUGH SOREN HIMSELF WAS CONVINCED HE WAS RIGHT, FEW BELIEVED HIM AND HIS RESEARCH WAS MARGINALISED.

Malarial DNA


It was in the late 1990s that a British scientist first heard about David Soren's work on the children of Lugnano. Robert Sallares was a DNA expert based at UMIST (University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology). He was particularly interested in using the latest DNA techniques to identify diseases of the past. His main problem was finding bones that might be associated with a particular disease.


There was no point in looking randomly at bones from the past, he needed to know that there was a good chance that the person had died of a particular disease.
At first Sallares was unable to find suitable bones, but when he read about Soren's work, he approached him about doing DNA tests. Soren jumped at the opportunity.


Not only did Robert Sallares take his theory seriously, but now, for the first time, there was a forensic technique that would give cast-iron evidence either way as to the presence of malaria. Sallares and his team painstakingly analysed the bones, searching for the tell-tale DNA traces of the disease.

The first four results all came up negative. IT WAS NOT UNTIL SALLARES TRIED THE FIFTH AND LAST BONE SAMPLES THAT HE FINALLY CAME UP WITH A POSITIVE RESULT. HE WAS ABLE TO SHOW THE PRESENCE OF MALARIAL DNA IN THE LEG BONES OF A THREE-YEAR-OLD GIRL. BECAUSE OF THE WAY MALARIA SPREADS, THIS PARTICULAR MALARIA WAS MOST LIKELY PART OF AN EPIDEMIC SWEEPING THROUGH A REGION OF ITALY.


THE USE OF DNA PROBES TO IDENTIFY DISEASES OF THE PAST HAS RECENTLY BEEN APPLIED TO MANY OTHER DISEASES, INCLUDING THE BLACK DEATH. IT IS PARTICULARLY USEFUL IN DISEASES THAT DO NOT LEAVE TELL-TALE SIGNS OF SYMPTOMS ON THE BONES OF VICTIMS - WHICH APPLIES TO MOST DISEASES.


FOR INSTANCE, PEOPLE WHO DIE OF SYPHILIS HAVE VERY DISTINCTIVE MALFORMATIONS ON THE SKULL, BUT MALARIA ONLY CAUSES SIGNS OF DISEASE IN SOME BONES - SO USUALLY IT IS ONLY BY MEANS OF A DNA TEST THAT SCIENTISTS CAN BE POSITIVE THAT MALARIA WAS PRESENT WHEN SOMEONE DIED.


THE DNA WORK OF ROBERT SALLARES HAS NOW CONFIRMED THAT MALARIA WAS A KILLER DURING LATE ROMAN TIMES. THE CHILDREN OF LUGNANO DIED OF MALARIA, AND IT IS LIKELY THAT THERE WERE ALSO MANY ADULT VICTIMS OF THE DISEASE, ALTHOUGH THEIR CEMETERY HAS NOT YET BEEN FOUND.


THIS WOULD HAVE MADE IT DIFFICULT FOR FARMERS TO COLLECT CROPS AND FOR THE LOCAL ARMY COMMANDERS TO RAISE TROOPS. WHAT WAS ONCE A FOOTNOTE IN THE HISTORY BOOKS ON THE FALL OF ROME, MUST NOW BECOME A WHOLE CHAPTER. DAVID SOREN'S THEORY THAT MALARIA CONTRIBUTED TO THE FALL OF ROME HAS FINALLY BEEN VINDICATED.

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Human Parasites of the Roman Empire


LAST WEEK PHOTOS OF ROMAN TOILETS WERE SPLASHED ACROSS THE WEB BREAKING THE NEWS THAT THE ROMANS WERE NOT A HEALTHY AS MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE ASSUMED. AS WITH MANY PUBLIC HEALTH INTERVENTIONS, THE REAL VALUE OF A SANITATION SYSTEM IS OUT OF VIEW (AND OUT OF MIND) TO MOST PEOPLE. IT’S NOT THE TOILET THAT KEEPS US HEALTHY; ITS THE WATER TREATMENT PLANT. PLUMBING JUST MOVES WASTE WITH ITS MICROBES AND PARASITES FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER.

PALEOPARASITOLOGY SPECIALIST PIERS MITCHELL PUT THE ROMAN PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM TO THE TEST BY EVALUATING THE EVIDENCE FOR HUMAN PARASITES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL REMAINS FROM BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE ROMAN EMPIRE.


COMPARISONS BEFORE AND AFTER THE EMPIRE ARE MORE DIFFICULT IN NORTH AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST BECAUSE THESE AREAS HAD LONG STANDING SOPHISTICATED CIVILIZATIONS BEFORE THE ROMAN EMPIRE.


THERE IS MORE CLARITY BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS IN EUROPE SINCE CELTIC AND GERMANIC SOCIETIES DID NOT HAVE ANYTHING LIKE ROMAN INFRASTRUCTURE. CONTRARY TO HIS EXPECTATIONS, THERE WERE JUST AS MANY PARASITES AND ECTOPARASITES IN THE ROMAN ERA AS BEFORE OR AFTER. IN SOME CASES THE EMPIRE HELPED SPREAD PARASITES ACROSS EUROPE.


Relative amounts of parasites across times is difficult to ascertain for a huge variety of reasons. So while the same parasites were present, the degree of infestation would have varied by place and time period, and archaeology can’t reliably predict this.

THE ROMAN ACHILLES’ HEEL WAS THEIR USE OF HUMAN WASTE FOR FERTILIZER AND FECAL CONTAMINATION OF RIVERS. HUMAN WASTE WAS ADDED TO THE OTHER MANURE AND REDISTRIBUTED TO FARM FIELDS AND THE WATERSHED. WHAT THEY COULD NOT HAVE UNDERSTOOD IS THAT HUMAN WASTE IS A GREATER RISK FOR THE TRANSMISSION OF HUMAN PARASITES AND BACTERIAL DISEASES.


MITCHELL ALSO SUGGESTS THAT ROMAN BATH WATER, THAT WAS RARELY CHANGED, COULD HAVE TRANSMITTED WORM EGGS AND OTHER PARASITES.


AQUADUCTS DID BRING IN CLEANER WATER TO SOME OF THE LARGER CITIES BUT THE SYSTEM COULD BE CONTAMINATED AND NOT ALL ROMAN SITES HAD ACCESS TO WATER FROM AQUADUCTS. WALTER SCHEIDEL (2015:8) HAS CLAIMED THAT THE CITY OF ROME ITSELF WAS AN EXAMPLE OF THE”URBAN GRAVEYARD” EFFECT WITH A VERY UNHEALTHY POPULATION DESPITE HAVING A “HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED FOOD AND WATER SUPPLY”. SCHEIDEL EMPHASIZES THE IMPACT OF MALARIA AND GASTROINTESTINAL DISEASE. WE SHOULD ALSO KEEP IN MIND THAT A LARGE PROPORTION OF GASTROINTESTINAL DISEASE WOULD HAVE BEEN BACTERIAL OR VIRAL.



Second century Roman mosaic of foodstuffs
As the mosaic to the left shows, the Romans did change agriculture throughout the empire. They spread Mediterranean preferences for cereals and more fish and other aquatic food sources.


MITCHELL SUGGESTS THAT THE ROMAN LOVE FOR FISH PRODUCTS, ESPECIALLY THE FERMENTED FISH SAUCE GARUM, PROBABLY HELP SPREAD FISH TAPEWORMS FOUND THROUGHOUT THE EMPIRE. MANY PARASITES AND BACTERIAL SPORES HAVE EVOLVED TO WITHSTAND PRESERVING METHODS LIKE SMOKING, PICKLING, AND OSMOTIC PRESERVATION (LIKE SALTING OR SUGARING).


WHIPWORM WAS THE MOST COMMON PARASITE FOUND, BUT ROUND WORMS AND TAPE WORMS WERE ALSO COMMON. LANCET LIVER FLUKES WERE WIDESPREAD AND INDICATE THE (PRESUMABLY ACCIDENTAL) CONSUMPTION OF ANTS. ANTIBODY BASED DETECTION (ELISA) HAS BEEN ABLE TO IDENTIFY ENTAMOEBA HISTOLYTICA THAT CAUSES THE USUALLY ENDEMIC AMOEBIC DYSENTERY (AS OPPOSED TO THE EPIDEMIC BACTERIAL DYSENTERY CAUSED BY SHIGELLA SPECIES).


ALTHOUGH NOT STRICTLY SPEAKING PARASITES, MITCHELL NOTES AN ABUNDANCE OF EVIDENCE FOR FLIES AROUND CESSPITS SUGGESTING THAT THEY CONTRIBUTED TO THE SPREAD OF DISEASES ASSOCIATED WITH FECAL CONTAMINATION. HE ALSO NOTES THAT SCHISTOSOMIASIS HAS NOT BEEN IDENTIFIED IN ROMAN EUROPE, EVEN THOUGH IT HAS BEEN FOUND IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN REMAINS.

TURNING TO ECTOPARASITES, MITCHELL FOUND AMPLE EVIDENCE OF HEAD LICE, BODY LICE, PUBLIC LICE, HUMAN FLEAS AND BED BUGS ACROSS THE ROMANIZED WORLD.


HUMAN FLEAS (PULEX IRRITANS) HAVE BEEN PARTICULARLY WELL PRESERVED IN ROMAN, ANGLO-SCANDINAVIAN AND MEDIEVAL YORK IN BRITAIN. MITCHELL NOTES THAT HUMAN FLEAS AND BODY LICE WERE PRESENT IN OVER 50 ARCHAEOLOGICAL LAYERS AT YORK. HE CONCLUDES THAT “THE ROMAN HABIT OF WASHING IN PUBLIC BATHS DOES NOT SEEM TO HAVE DECREASED THEIR RISK OF CONTRACTING ECTOPARASITES, COMPARED WITH VIKING AND MEDIEVAL PEOPLE WHO DID NOT USE PUBLIC BATHS IN THE SAME WAY” (MITCHELL 2016: 6).


MITCHELL SUGGESTS THAT THERE WERE ENOUGH ECTOPARASITES TO SUPPORT PARTICULARLY LICE TRANSMITTED DISEASES. HE NOTES THAT PLAGUE OF JUSTINIAN WAS TRANSMITTED BY FLEAS BUT IS NON-COMMITTAL ON THE LIKELY SPECIFIC VECTOR.

IN EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, MITCHELL NOTES THAT THE TRANSITION FROM A WIDE VARIETY OF ZOONOTIC PARASITES TO THOSE PRIMARILY ASSOCIATED WITH HUMAN FECAL CONTAMINATION HAD ALREADY OCCURRED BEFORE THE ROMAN EXPANSION OUT OF ITALY.


THIS SHIFT IS PARALLELED ELSEWHERE AND IS TIED TO SHIFT FROM HUNTER-GATHERS TO SETTLED AGRICULTURE. WHIPWORM, ROUNDWORM AND AMOEBIC DYSENTERY WERE THE PRIMARY PARASITES OF ROMAN EUROPE, WHILE THE ROMANS SEEM TO HAVE MADE A LESSER IMPACT ON NORTH AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST WHERE ENDEMIC ZONES OF PARASITES WERE WELL ESTABLISHED.


Malaria is the one parasitic disease I would have liked to see Mitchell discuss more. Mitchell notes that malarial aDNA has been found in Egypt and anemia possibly caused by malaria in Italy. He overlooks all the malaria work by Robert Sallares including malarial aDNA from Late Roman Italy and better anemia studies correlating with malaria have been done in Italy and Britain by Rebecca Gowland’s group. Yet, malaria is such a big topic that it would be hard to cover along with all the other parasites.

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Originally posted by Mike111:

Not bad kdolo, but you are wrong, the How and Why are extremely important in understanding what happened.

I mean if Blacks were the original settlers of Europe - and they were, then how could they be out-numbered and defeated by the Central Asian Albino immigrants?

1) Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

2) The FIRST invasion of Europe by the Albinos circa 1,200 B.C. led to the first large-scale flight from Europe of Blacks - called exodus of the Sea people.

3) Blacks were further "thinned-out" by Mongol invasions - the Huns.

4) The second invasion of Central Asian Albinos started circa year zero A.D. By it's end, circa 600-700 A.D. Central Asia had been all but emptied of Albinos, when the Mongols chased the last ones - the Turks out of Asia.

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
Mike and other's here, Europe WAS DENSELY POPULATED; and the whole episode w/ the BLACK DEATH PLAGUE AND OTHER PLAGUES BEFORE IT IN EUROPE, PROVES THIS WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT; THIS LITTLE ICE AGE THREAD EXPLAINS HOW BLACK EUROPEANS WERE DISPLACED BY WHITE EURASIAN MIGRANTS FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPES AND THE FACTORS DESCRIBED HERE IS THE ONLY RATIONAL NATURAL EXPLANATION OF HOW BLACK EUROPEANS ENDED GETTING DISPLACED!


If the people on this forum are really stupid and ignorant enough to ACTUALLY BELIEVE THAT EUROPE WAS NOT DENSELY POPULATED BY ANCIENT GRECO-ROMANS TIMES TO THE MIDDLE AGES AND TO THE CLASSICAL PERIOD, PARTICULARLY SOUTHERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE; HOW COME, then, did plagues LIKE THE BLACK DEATH and EARLIER PLAGUES in Europe killed so many, SO MANY MEDIEVAL-MIDDLE AGES EUROPEANS AND HAVE SUCH A LARGE CASUALTY IMPACT IN EUROPE DURING THIS SELECT TIME PERIOD?

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Originally posted by Mike111:
I mean if Blacks were the original settlers of Europe - and they were, then how could they be out-numbered and defeated by the Central Asian Albino immigrants?

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Originally posted by Mike111:

1) Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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Originally posted by Mike111:

if Blacks were the original settlers of Europe - and they were, then how could they be out-numbered and defeated by the Central Asian Albino immigrants?

1) Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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You and Mike say whites came into Europe around 1200 BC
and more around 400 to 700 AD.
However the main plague and little ice age both occur hundreds of years after that around 1300 AD.

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Thus you depart from Mike at this point when we look at a timeline you are saying clearly doesn't explain this:

It further doesn't make sense because the plague and little ice age would have had the same affect on white people as black people.

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Again:


Let's go to 1000 BC a time before the time you say whites migrated into Europe and well before the plague and little ice age. At time when you say Europe was virtually all black.

So where is your evidence in this earlier period it was densely populated by them ?????

So every step of the way you don't have support to your theories

Therefore Mike is right

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Abstract

Analysis of the proportion of immature skeletons recovered from European prehistoric cemeteries has shown that the transition to agriculture after 9000 BP triggered a long-term increase in human fertility. Here we compare the largest analysis of European cemeteries to date with an independent line of evidence, the summed calibrated date probability distribution of radiocarbon dates (SCDPD) from archaeological sites.


Our cemetery reanalysis confirms increased growth rates after the introduction of agriculture; the radiocarbon analysis also shows this pattern, and a significant correlation between both lines of evidence confirms the demographic validity of SCDPDs. We analyze the areal extent of Neolithic enclosures and demographic data from ethnographically known farming and foraging societies and we estimate differences in population levels at individual sites.


We find little effect on the overall shape and precision of the SCDPD and we observe a small increase in the correlation with the cemetery trends.


The SCDPD analysis supports the hypothesis that the transition to agriculture dramatically increased demographic growth, but it was followed within centuries by a general pattern of collapse even after accounting for higher settlement densities during the Neolithic. The study supports the unique contribution of SCDPDs as a valid demographic proxy for the demographic patterns associated with early agriculture.


Introduction

The transition from foraging to farming economies resulted in the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT) [1], which enabled higher population levels worldwide linked to a new regime of high fertility and mortality rates. One important source of evidence on palaeodemography is the analysis of human skeletal remains, and a variety of indices designed to estimate the proportion of juvenile skeletons within populations have provided unique insights into population growth rates and the structure of prehistoric human populations (cf. [2], [3]).


These metrics have been widely used to analyze the timing and effects of early agriculture on the structure of human populations [4]–[6], and the observation of a higher proportion of juveniles after the introduction of farming has supported claims that fertility surged following the introduction of agriculture in Europe and other parts of the world [1]. Such insights helped refute the population pressure model, a long-standing claim by Binford [7] and others that demographic growth during the Mesolithic preceded and drove the agricultural transition [8].

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^^^ Even after the introduction of agriculture to Europe about 8,500 years ago, growing Neolithic communities still experienced large population swings.


From boom to bust in Neolithic Europe

AS AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES SPREAD FROM THE FERTILE CRESCENT ACROSS EUROPE, GRADUALLY EXPANDING WEST AND NORTH STARTING ABOUT 8,500 YEARS AGO, THEY BROUGHT INCREASED AND LOCALIZED FOOD PRODUCTION TO A CONTINENT WHERE NOMADIC HUNTER-GATHERERS HAD LONG MADE THEIR LIVING SUBJECT TO THE WHIMS OF CLIMATE AND THE ENVIRONMENT. WITH AGRICULTURE, LONG-TERM SETTLEMENTS DEVELOPED, FERTILITY RATES ROSE AND, THUS, POPULATIONS GREW STEADILY. OR AT LEAST THAT’S BEEN THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM.


IN RECENT YEARS, SOME SCIENTISTS HAVE QUESTIONED JUST HOW STEADY NEOLITHIC POPULATION GROWTH REALLY WAS. AND NOW, RESEARCHERS ANALYZING ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORDS GATHERED FROM ACROSS EUROPE SUGGEST THAT MANY REGIONS ACTUALLY EXPERIENCED LARGE POPULATION SWINGS DURING THE PERIOD.


Booms and busts among animal populations are well known, but scientists have assumed that technology, including agriculture, “buffers out those instabilities” in human populations, says Sean Downey, an ecological anthropologist at the University of Maryland at College Park and a co-author of a new study on the subject published in Nature Communications. But, Downey says, this study documents “dramatic oscillations in human population dynamics” in Neolithic Europe.


He and his colleagues, led by Stephen Shennan of University College London, amassed more than 13,500 radiocarbon dates from previously cataloged Neolithic artifacts, grouping them into 12 sub-regions — including several each in the British Isles, France, Germany, and southern Scandinavia — based on where they had been found.


To study population trends, they analyzed “summed calibrated date probability distributions” (SCDPD), basically treating the number of radiocarbon-dated artifacts collected from a given region as a proxy for that area’s relative population density over time.


IT’S A TECHNIQUE THAT HAS BEEN CRITICIZED AND IS — ADMITTEDLY, EVEN TO THOSE WHO USE IT — FRAUGHT WITH POTENTIAL SOURCES OF ERROR, BOTH IN DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS.


TO ADDRESS THESE ISSUES, DOWNEY AND HIS COLLEAGUES FIRST REMOVED DUPLICATE DATES TAKEN FROM SINGLE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES TO ACCOUNT FOR RESEARCHERS DISPROPORTIONATELY SAMPLING SOME SITES MORE THAN OTHERS. THE TEAM THEN PUT THE REMAINING DATA THROUGH A RIGOROUS STATISTICAL TREATMENT TO ACCOUNT FOR ALL OTHER KNOWN BIASES, DOWNEY SAYS, INCLUDING ERROR INTRODUCED INTO THE CALIBRATION CURVE USED TO CONVERT RADIOCARBON DATES TO CALENDAR YEARS AND POPULATION NUMBERS.


“EVEN WHEN YOU ACCOUNT FOR ALL THAT, YOU STILL HAVE STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT BOOM AND BUST PATTERNS,” DOWNEY SAYS. IN FACT, THE RESEARCHERS FOUND SUCH PATTERNS IN 10 OF THE 12 SUBREGIONS STUDIED, WITH SOME AREAS EXPERIENCING MULTIPLE COLLAPSES BETWEEN 8,000 AND 4,000 YEARS AGO. AT TIMES, POPULATION DECLINES OF 30 TO 60 PERCENT OCCURRED IN INDIVIDUAL REGIONS, SIMILAR IN PROPORTION TO THE DROP EXPERIENCED WHEN EUROPE WAS RAVAGED BY BUBONIC PLAGUE IN THE 14TH CENTURY.


AFTER ESTABLISHING THAT THE BOOMS AND BUSTS WERE REAL, DOWNEY SAYS, THE NEXT QUESTION WAS WHY THE LATTER HAPPENED DESPITE THE EMERGENCE OF AGRICULTURE. SUSTAINED PERIODS OF COOLING HAVE BEEN THE MOST COMMON HYPOTHESIS, BUT SUPPORT FOR THIS IDEA HAS LARGELY BEEN QUALITATIVE, HE SAYS.


SO, USING THE SAME STATISTICAL METHODS THEY HAD PREVIOUSLY USED, THEY TESTED FOR QUANTITATIVE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THEIR POPULATION DATA AND VARIOUS CLIMATE RECORDS, INCLUDING PROXIES FOR AIR TEMPERATURE AND PRECIPITATION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND NORTHERN EUROPE. INSTEAD OF SUPPORT FOR THE CLIMATE HYPOTHESIS, THEY FOUND A “LACK OF CORRELATION BETWEEN OVERALL GROSS CHANGES IN CLIMATE PATTERNS AND THE POPULATION OSCILLATIONS,” DOWNEY SAYS, SUGGESTING THAT OTHER FACTORS WERE AT PLAY.


OUTBREAKS OF DISEASE AND CONFLICT AND OVEREXPLOITATION OF THE LAND IN INCREASINGLY DENSE SETTLEMENTS ARE ALL POSSIBILITIES. MASS MIGRATIONS OF PEOPLE — WHICH COULD LEAD TO APPARENT BOOMS AND BUSTS AS, FOR EXAMPLE, ONE REGION BECAME POPULATED AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS — ARE ANOTHER. BUT, DOWNEY NOTES, POPULATION TRENDS IN NEIGHBORING REGIONS ARE “CONSISTENTLY COORDINATED THROUGH TIME,” SEEMINGLY NEGATING SUCH MIGRATIONS AS A LIKELY EXPLANATION.


THE MAIN ADVANCEMENT OF THE WORK IS THAT IT HAS TAKEN “THE SCDPD METHOD TO THE NEXT LEVEL,” SAYS MIIKKA TALLAVAARA, AN ARCHAEOLOGIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI IN FINLAND WHO WAS NOT INVOLVED IN THE STUDY. THE NEW STATISTICAL PROCEDURE IS IMPORTANT, HE SAYS, BECAUSE FAULTY RADIOCARBON CALIBRATIONS CAN CAUSE “ARTIFICIAL PEAKS AND TROUGHS” IN POPULATION DENSITIES. IT’S ALSO THE FIRST TIME SOMEONE HAS SHOWN “WITH A LARGE AMOUNT OF DATA, HOW CONSISTENT THE [BOOM AND BUST] PATTERN IS OVER LARGE AREAS.”


HOWEVER, TALLAVAARA SAYS, IT’S TOO SOON TO TOSS OUT THE LINK BETWEEN THE POPULATION COLLAPSES AND CLIMATIC COOLING, NOTING THAT “WITH DIFFERENT, MORE [LOCALLY] REPRESENTATIVE PROXIES,” THE TEAM “MIGHT HAVE COME TO A DIFFERENT CONCLUSION REGARDING THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE.”


AT THIS POINT, DOWNEY SAYS, “WE DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT CAUSED THESE COLLAPSES.” WHAT IS CLEAR IS THAT THE BUSTS MUST HAVE HAD MAJOR IMPLICATIONS FOR EARLY EUROPEAN SOCIETIES, as well as major effects on the landscape.

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Plague germs may have facilitated Bronze Age expansions from the steppe


Summary: The bacteria Yersinia pestis is the etiological agent of plague and has caused human pandemics with millions of deaths in historic times. How and when it originated remains contentious. Here, we report the oldest direct evidence of Yersinia pestis identified by ancient DNA in human teeth from Asia and Europe dating from 2,800 to 5,000 years ago.


By sequencing the genomes, we find that these ancient plague strains are basal to all known Yersinia pestis. We find the origins of the Yersinia pestis lineage to be at least two times older than previous estimates.


We also identify a temporal sequence of genetic changes that lead to increased virulence and the emergence of the bubonic plague. Our results show that plague infection was endemic in the human populations of Eurasia at least 3,000 years before any historical recordings of pandemics.





Rasmussen et al., Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago, Cell, Volume 163, Issue 3, p571–582, 22 October 2015, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.10.009

Also, some juicy quotes at ScienceDaily:


Study co-author Dr Marta Mirazón-Lahr, from Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES), points out that a study earlier this year from Willerslev's Copenhagen group showed the Bronze Age to be a highly active migratory period, which could have led to the spread of pneumonic plague.


"The Bronze Age was a period of major metal weapon production, and it is thought increased warfare, which is compatible with emerging evidence of large population movements at the time.

If pneumonic plague was carried as part of these migrations, it would have had devastating effects on small groups they encountered," she said. "Well-documented cases have shown the pneumonic plague's chain of infection can go from a single hunter or herder to ravaging an entire community in two to three days."


IMPORTANT AND INFORMATIVE COMMENTS FROM POST:


"Alberto said... This has been suggested here before. Migrants from far away places can often bring viruses or bacteria with them that can have a big impact on the local population who have not developed the same kind of resistance to it.


A secret, powerful and quiet weapon that cannot be ignored as a possibility. Maybe if we relate this to the apparent population bottleneck (some recent study about it) that most of Europe experienced at the time, and the huge founder effects that we see, we might have something interesting. Now that Lactase Persistance seems not to make a great case by itself, this hypothesis might be worth a closer look."


"Sonic Reducer said... The Americas are a perfect example of what new disease, can do to an indigenous population. From something like 50 million pre Columbian Amerindians to 5 million present day? "


"Matt said... Possibly you could see this as linked to the population turnover, although unlike with the Americas it would be harder to see why disease should go from one direction to the other (there it is clear that the larger Eurasian network and lack of the Beringian cold filter and different presence of domesticate animals and human related fauna generally seems to be what led to an imbalance in virulent disease, even if this may get exaggerated).


Although there is still possibility - steppe populations from Afanasievo to Yamnaya could have picked up and had an adaptive edge on nasties from burgeoning agricultural populations of China, for instance, that weren't commonly around in West Eurasia (despite probably not much / any cultural contact with East Asia). The usual hypothesis on Black Plague is marmots in Mongolia, AFAIK."


"andrew said... There are several viable reasons for a Neolithic bottleneeck in Europe. 1. Climate events. 2. Farming collapse due to over exploitation of resources like soils. 3. Plague. Immuno-impairment caused by poor diet caused by (1) or (2) could easily boost (3)."


"Rob said... @ Roy Exactly ! I suspect plague preceded the Bronze Age populations. It’s certainly a more sound explanation of why there was a late neolithic collapse- from central Anatolia to Scandinavia - without resorting to socially "imaginative" and chronologically impossible tales. This hypothetical plague appeared to have hit G2a men most of all.


On the Y-chromosome lies the male-specific immunohistocompatability complex Y-HC, involved with T cell (CD8 and CD4 T cells) regulation. If not related to that, then it must also have been related to the overcrowded conditions of densely populated tell settlements and tepe, living in close quarters with animals, etc.


the WHGs were more resilient because they were less densely populated and continued a broader economy, similar with the eastern pastoralist groups who moved in the wake of this population collapse into scantily uninhabited land in central Europe."


"Rob said... Krefter Very few if any serious contributors mentioned anything about mass slaughter, although warfare seems to have been endemic *within* local farmer communities in Europe ; as it was likely later *within* the steppe- with mutually antagonistic pastoralist groups clambering for the best pastures and trade routes- hence the local turnovers, replacements and departure of one group to central-western Europe. Rather, What needs revising is the "elite conquest" model- at least for the earlier part of PIE history"


"Karl_K said... @postneo These bacteria lack the flea associated genes. So they could only be spread by mammal to mammal contact. But this does not mean that they were any less deadly. It spreads through direct contact, but will kill people 90% of the time anyway. The flea transmission was a killer in later cities, where large domestic animals were at a distance. This could have been just as deadly when everyone lived in very close proximity to herds of mammals."


"Grey said... If there was an earlier spread of steppe dudes into the LBK as a small minority (metal workers, horse traders, bouncers, whatever) bringing their animals with them that could provide a vector."

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Come on MOM.
Mike says Europe was not densely populated by anybody until "the second invasion of Central Asian Albinos started circa year zero A.D. By it's end, circa 600-700 A.D. Central Asia had been all but emptied of Albinos, when the Mongols chased the last ones - the Turks out of Asia."

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

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^^ This is your Black European ???

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
Yes these Neolithic farmers that arrived to Europe from the MIDDLE EAST, WERE BLACK/BROWN/COLORED PEOPLE! We have already established that on multiple occasions here on ES!!!

Because THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE FROM THE "MIDDLE EAST" LOOKED LIKE AS LONG AGO AS MERELY 1550 BC!























CLEARLY THESE NEOLITHIC FARMERS AND MIGRANTS WERE A BLACK/COLORED "NON-WHITE/NON-WHITE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES", AND THIS STUDY PROVES THAT THE FIRST SETTLERS AND CIVILIZATION BUILDERS OF EUROPE WERE A BLACK/COLORED PEOPLE FROM AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST!

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:


Because THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE FROM THE "MIDDLE EAST" LOOKED LIKE AS LONG AGO AS MERELY 1550 BC!

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

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^^ there are a lot of variations on these cartoonish Phoenician glass beads. You are just cherry picking the black one
 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:




CLEARLY THESE NEOLITHIC FARMERS AND MIGRANTS WERE A BLACK/COLORED "NON-WHITE/NON-WHITE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES", AND THIS STUDY PROVES THAT THE FIRST SETTLERS AND CIVILIZATION BUILDERS OF EUROPE WERE A BLACK/COLORED PEOPLE FROM AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST![/qb]

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[/QB][/QUOTE]





Asiatic tribute bearers - Tomb of Sobekhotep 18th, Dyn.

No surprise here. You have this category " BLACK/COLORED"
it doesn't really mean much.
Nothing to surprising here a bunch of brown skin Middle Eastern or Mediterranean or Iranian looking types.













Punic mask in the Bardo Museum, Tunis


hoenician art. Cyprus. 4th century BC.
Classical Period. Grave marker
depicting two men reclining at a banquet (top)
and a couple (bottom). Limestone. Golgoi (Cyprus).


One cannot assume that brown skin means a given person is more similar to an African than they are to a European. You would have to look at the DNA of each person.
The ancestors of light skinned Europeans are brown skinned anyway so what you sayin'?
 

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Posted by Mindovermatter (Member # 22317) on :
 
^^^^^he he he he he he he he he he he he, same old Liarness using cherry picking and flawed and pick and choose pictures and clues and arguments to make lies and more lies and lying flawed arguments; even when all the DIRECT EVIDENCE has been offered thus far, you intentionally ignore it and then intentionally pick and choose stuff that supports and expands your own agenda!

EVEN WHEN THERE IS OTHER EVIDENCE THAT CONTRADICTS AND GOES AGAINST IT THAT IS POSTED HERE. AND EVEN IGNORE STUFF THAT I SAID, LIKE THE FACT THAT THE NEOLITHIC BLACK FARMER TYPE POPULATIONS WERE DISPLACED AND ERADICATED BY THE FACTORS THAT I DESCRIBED IN THIS THREAD! And it becomes OBVIOUS TO ANYONE READING THIS THREAD! AND YOU ALSO MAKE LIES UP AS WELL AS YOU GO ALONG!

LIKE HERE:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/26823-More-evidence-of-genetic-discontinuity-between-Neolithic-and-modern-Europeans

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More evidence of genetic discontinuity between Neolithic and modern Europeans


Here is more ancient DNA from the Danubian Neolithic. The remains come from the Great Hungarian Plain and date from circa 6000 BCE, so approximately 500 years before the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK). They are therefore the oldest Neolithic DNA from Europe so far, and the second from Hungary (Haak et al. 2005 found a single N1a1b sample). This time they were able to test 23 samples and identify five haplogroups. All of them are extremely rare in Europe today : N9a, N1a, C5, D1/G1a and M/R24.

This is an astonishing array of haplogroups to say the least. Although N1a has popped up frequently in Neolithic sites from Western and central Europe before, and is still common in the Caucasus nowadays, the others are typical of various regions Asia and not normally found in the same population.

- N9a has a very wide range. It is found all the way from East Asian (including China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia) to Eastern Europe, via Central Asia.

- C5 is more typical of Northern and Central Asia, but is also found at very low frequencies in Eastern and Central Europe.

- D1/G1 : G1 and D1 are both typical of Siberia and Northeast Asia.

- R24 is normally found in the Philippines (never heard of other places), so it's probably a mistake.

I cannot see how any of these haplogroups besides N1a could be of Near Eastern origin. It's more likely that a group of Siberian or Central Asian Palaeolithic nomads reached Hungary and were absorbed by the West Asian herders/farmers who had barely arrived in the region.

Unfortunately the abstract doesn't say how many individuals of each haplogroup there were. I suppose that N1a was in higher proportion than the rest.

comment:

These mt dna results are indeed unusual for Europe today, but in general terms, as the title of the thread itself indicates, this is just the latest in a line of scholarly articles showing the discontinuity between modern populations and ancient ones. Paleolithic mt dna seems to be quite different from Neolithic mtdna, which is again different from modern mt dna. The same was found to be true for Etruscan and modern Tuscan populations as the overall distributions were very different. (although there was continuity between early medieval results and modern Tuscan results).

The extinction rate for mtdna is high (see Oetzi's results for example) and certain lineages can, even in a very short time, become highly under or over represented, as this study done on Icelandic mt dna makes clear, and this is true even absent any significant migration.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...HGv72p1370.pdf

The same is true for y-dna, although perhaps not to as great an extent. One member of the amateur community recently did a mathematical analysis to illustrate just that.

A population of 1000 males undergoes 4 percent per generation growth for past 150 generations, resulting in 370,000 males today. With sufficient dna tags (STRs, SNPs, etc) one could imagine each of those 1000 original males representing a distinctive genetic y line.

What do we see today among those 370,000 descendants in the way of distinct original lines? 87 percent of those 1000 lines went extinct; they are gone from today’s population. The most populous represented original line accounts for 4.4 percent of today’s population. The 10 most populous lines represented today account for 24.1 percent of the 370,000. And the 20 most populous lines represent 40.6 percent of the 370,000.

The above results indicate the very strong creation of demographic “winners” and “losers” of y lines based solely on statistical flucuations --- before any other factors are brought into consideration. This source of demographic winners versus losers must be understood before speculations about connnections of populous y haplogroups today to migrating, militarily advanced, technically advanced, culturally advanced......... etc. tribes of the distant past can be even tried intelligently.

I couldn't agree more.


"Originally Posted by Angela View Post
More vast generalizations with no supporting data.

There is no way that you could possibly know that the exact mtDNA lineages of all the adna remains found (all those U4's and U5's for example), still exist, because we don't have the exact lineages for most of them.


There is no need to know the exact lineages. It's enough to know that if various Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age sites throughout northern Europe constantly yielded U4 and U5 lineages, while these were never found in the Middle East, the probabilities that modern U4 and U5 lineages descend from Paleolithic northern Europeans are extremely high compared to any other region. Testing the whole mtDNA sequence is useless because :

1) Mutations in mtDNA can occur at any birth. Actually mtDNA is very fickle, and private mutations often occurs within a same individual, so that different cells coming from the same person will not necessarily have the exact same mutations (I have a family member who got 5 different mutations by testing with different companies, although the haplogroup and subclade was always the same). One or two unique private mutations do no mean anything.

2) In several millennia some many mutations should have taken place that it would be dazzling to find lineages that had not evolved at all since then.

3) We can only test a tiny fraction of any ancient population from any period in a given region, due to the scarcity of remains. Since not every individual procreated. Some died from diseases, were killed or just didn't have a chance to have children who reached sexual maturity and procreate too. There is a high chance that a person who lived 8000 years ago didn't pass on her mtDNA to the modern population are quite high. But that doesn't mean that the source population isn't the same ! The important is to be able to determine where and when a lineage originated.


Otzi is mtDNA K. Obviously there are many K lineages that still exist today. However, thanks to the preservation of Otzi's remains, detailed tests could be done, and the result is that for now his specific lineage appears to be extinct.
Actually it is too soon to tell if Ötzi's mtDNA is still present in the modern population or not, because not enough people were tested for the whole mtDNA sequence, especially around the Alps and in the Middle East. Anyway, Ötzi being a man, he couldn't have passed his mtDNA. How do we know that some (distant) female cousins had the mutations that made him K1ö ? It doesn't rule out that modern K1 Europeans descend from the same Central European Neolithic/Chalcolithic culture which Ötzi belonged to.

Of course, neither is it proven, for now, that those adna lineages are, indeed, extinct. What we do know, however, based on actual research, is that certain lineages, at least in certain areas, do indeed go extinct, some predominate, and others become minor lineages. Also, for now, the process appears to be random. (Did you bother to read the paper?) We also know, from mathematical modeling, that this should not be a surprise.

Without a much better understanding of the statistical fluctuations, the actual mutational processes involved, what role, if any, selection plays etc. etc., all these speculations of this or that superior tribe moving to x or y area, are just fairy tales, and usually fairy tales based on some jingoistic or racist agenda. This whole hobby is really getting to be a waste of time.
Mathematical models and statistical analysis may work well for theoretical phenomenons, or even physical and chemical ones, but they are not suited to the study of human history. There are many reasons for that.

1) Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages can prosper or go extinct simply for evolutionary reasons. MtDNA especially seems to be linked to adaptation to the environment (climate, diseases). People move and climate changes. This cannot be predicted by mathematics.

2) Whole local lineages are sometimes wiped out by wars, famines or diseases. This also cannot be predicted by mathematics.

3) mathematics do not take into consideration the variations in population sizes over the ages (it could, but we simply do not have the data). Large populations will naturally develop more new mutations. This is the single biggest problem encountered by mathematicians who tried to calculate the age of haplogroups based on the number of mutations (such as STR variances).

The evolution of human society is so complex and linked to so many external factors that trying to understand it through mathematics is futile. It would be like trying to understand economics with the help of chemical laws.


The important is always to look at the bigger picture and keep one's common sense. Most of the Neolithic studies from the Danubian region have yielded mtDNA and Y-DNA haplogroups that are now rare in the European population. This, I think, is enough to say that there is a strong discontinuity of lineages between the Neolithic period and now in that particular region. Just to be clear, 'discontinuity' here doesn't mean that modern people do not descend at all from Neolithic people. It means that only a (small) minority of their genes (at least based on mtDNA and Y-DNA) were inherited from them.

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Bayesian Serial Simcoal Analysis

While an apparent affinity of Neolithic farmers to modern-day Near East populations is revealed by the shared haplotype analyses, PCA, MDS, and genetic distance maps, the population-specific pairwise FST values among ancient populations (hunter–gatherers and LBK) and the modern population pools (Central Europe and Near East) tested were all significant (p>0.05; Table 3), suggesting a degree of genetic discontinuity between ancient and modern-day populations.


The early farmers were closer to the modern Near Eastern pool (FST = 0.03019) than hunter–gatherers were (FST = 0.04192), while both ancient populations showed similar differences to modern Central Europe, with the hunter–gatherers slightly closer (FST = 0.03445) than the early farmers (FST = 0.03958). The most striking difference was seen between Mesolithic hunter–gatherers and the LBK population itself (FST = 0.09298), as previously shown [20].

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Evidence for a genetic discontinuity between Neandertals and 24,000-year-old anatomically modern Europeans


Abstract
During the late Pleistocene, early anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe with the anatomically archaic Neandertals for some thousand years. Under the recent variants of the multiregional model of human evolution, modern and archaic forms were different but related populations within a single evolving species, and both have contributed to the gene pool of current humans. Conversely, the Out-of-Africa model considers the transition between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans as the result of a demographic replacement, and hence it predicts a genetic discontinuity between them.


Following the most stringent current standards for validation of ancient DNA sequences, we typed the mtDNA hypervariable region I of two anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens individuals of the Cro-Magnon type dated at about 23 and 25 thousand years ago. Here we show that the mtDNAs of these individuals fall well within the range of variation of today's humans, but differ sharply from the available sequences of the chronologically closer Neandertals.


This discontinuity is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that both Neandertals and early anatomically modern humans contributed to the current European gene pool.

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You dumbed it down well.


Turk & Mongol Rule (930 - 1534)

http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/images/turkish_seljuk_empire.jpg

http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/images/kurd_ayyubid_dynasty.jpg


http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/images/mongol_ilkhanate_empire.jpg

http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/images/turk_rule.jpg

http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/turk_mongol_rule.htm


Ottoman Empire in Iraq (1534 - 1917)

http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/images/ottoman_empire.jpg

http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/ottoman_empire.htm

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
More:

Benedict the Moor (about 1526 in San Fratello in Messina in Italy):



Coat of arms of Uettingen 6 June 1966:




Coat of arms of the Bishop of Freising, Bavaria Germany:



In gold and black diagonally left divided blade Ethiopian lion in confused color, a green branch with both hands", early 19th century?:




Coat of arms of the Freising county of Germany, Munchen region:



Coat of arms of the city of Lauingen (1270):



Coat of arms of Pappenheim (1251):




The Adoration of the Magi, Dutch 1515-25:

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Posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova (Member # 15718) on :
 
Mindovermatter says:
Ice age

I am 99.8% sure that this killed off major segments of Black Europe's ORIGINAL population. This likely played a part in Black Europeans losing control to Eurasian barbarians and Albino groups from Northern Europe.

The so-called "Little Ice Age" was between 1300 and
1700. So you are telling us with this strawman setup
that the "original negroes" died off between that
time.. Yes you are 99.8% sure... Right... .8..



 

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Posted by Mike111 (Member # 9361) on :
 
^Do what you have to do zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova, but please try to be gentle.
 

---

Posted by Mindovermatter (Member # 22317) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
Mindovermatter says:
Ice age

I am 99.8% sure that this killed off major segments of Black Europe's ORIGINAL population. This likely played a part in Black Europeans losing control to Eurasian barbarians and Albino groups from Northern Europe.

The so-called "Little Ice Age" was between 1300 and
1700. So you are telling us with this strawman setup
that the "original negroes" died off between that
time.. Yes you are 99.8% sure... Right... .8..

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Mike111:
[QB] ^Do what you have to do zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova, but please try to be gentle.

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The Thirty Years War

1618-1648

The Thirty Years War is one of the great conflicts of early modern European history. The Thirty Years War consisted of a series of declared and undeclared wars which raged through the years 1618-1648 throughout central Europe.


During the Thirty Years War the opponents were, on the one hand, the House of Austria: the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III together with their Spanish cousin Philip IV. During the long course of the Thirty Years War the Habsburgs were opposed by various international opponents of House of Austria: the Danish, Dutch and, above all, France and Sweden.

In addition to its international dimensions the Thirty Years War was a German civil war. The principalities which made up Germany took up arms for or against the Habsburgs or, most commonly, both at different times during the war’s 30 years.


The Thirty Years War was also, at least in part, a religious war among Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. Ferdinand II and, to a lesser degree, his primary ally Maximillian I represented the re-Catholicizing zeal of the Jesuit Counter-reformation, while Frederick V of the Palatinate represented the equally militant forces of Calvinism.

Foreign powers - The French, English and Dutch formed a league to oppose the Habsburgs. They found their champion in Christian IV of Denmark, who also had extensive possessions in northern Germany. Christian invaded, but was crushingly defeated by the army of the Catholic League and a new Imperial force under the enigmatic Bohemian condottiere Wallenstein. Emboldened by victory, the Emperor issued the Edict of Restitution, requiring the return of all lands expropriated from the Roman church since the 1550’s


Faced with increasing pressure from the Habsburgs, the Bohemians rose in revolt. They deposed the Habsburgs and crowned Frederick V of the Palatinate as their King. Initially, the revolt seemed destined for success.


However, Ferdinand II struck back, subsidized by his Spanish relatives and in alliance with the Catholic League and with Lutheran Saxony.


The Bohemians were utterly defeated near Prague at the White Mountain. Simultaneously the Spanish had invaded and conquered the Lower Palatinate, Frederick’s territories on the Rhine. This enabled the Spanish to secure the land route from their territories in Northern Italy to their lands in modern-day Belgium. Frederick V of the Palatinate and other Protestant rulers sought to regain the Rhenish Palatinate from the Spanish and the Catholic League. These efforts were supported by the Dutch who had been battling the Spaniards for independence since 1568. A strong Spanish presence on the Rhine was a strategic peril they could not ignore.



The Peace of Westphalia

Over the last four years of the war, the parties were actively negotiating at Osnabrück and Münster in Westphalia. On 24 October, 1648 the Peace of Westphalia was signed, ending the Thirty Years War. The Swedes received a large cash indemnity and control over western Pomerania, Bremen and Verden. The French recieved rights (nature unclear) over Alsace.


The control of the Emperor over the German territorial rulers was reduced to nothing. Within the German portion of the Empire, private exercise of non-conforming religion was permitted and the organs of government were rendered religiously neutral. Lands secularized by the Protestants in 1624 were generally allowed to remain so. However, in the Habsburg territories of Bohemia and Austria the Emperor was given a nearly free hand to re-impose Catholicism.



Results of the Wars

Casualties and disease



So great was the devastation brought about by the war that estimates put the reduction of population in the German states at about 25% to 40%. Some regions were affected much more than others. For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war. In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two-thirds of the population died.


The male population of the German states was reduced by almost half. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third due to war, disease, famine and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs. Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers, many of whom were rich commanders and poor soldiers. Villages were especially easy prey to the marauding armies.


Those that survived, like the small village of Drais near Mainz, would take almost a hundred years to recover. The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns. The war caused serious dislocations to both the economies and populations of central Europe, but may have done no more than seriously exacerbate changes that had begun earlier.
Beggar, probably war veteran circa 1622, by Jacques Callot

Pestilence of several kinds raged among combatants and civilians in Germany and surrounding lands from 1618 to 1648. Many features of the war spread disease. These included troop movements, the influx of soldiers from foreign countries, and the shifting locations of battle fronts.


In addition, the displacement of civilian populations and the overcrowding of refugees into cities led to both disease and famine. Information about numerous epidemics is generally found in local chronicles, such as parish registers and tax records, that are often incomplete and may be exaggerated. The chronicles do show that epidemic disease was not a condition exclusive to war time, but was present in many parts of Germany for several decades prior to 1618.

However, when the Danish and Imperial armies met in Saxony and Thuringia during 1625 and 1626, disease and infection in local communities increased. Local chronicles repeatedly referred to "head disease", "Hungarian disease", and a "spotted" disease identified as typhus. After the Mantuan War, between France and the Habsburgs in Italy, the northern half of the Italian peninsula was in the throes of a bubonic plague epidemic. During the unsuccessful siege of Nuremberg, in 1632, civilians and soldiers in both the Swedish and Imperial armies succumbed to typhus and scurvy.


Two years later, as the Imperial army pursued the defeated Swedes into southwest Germany, deaths from epidemics were high along the Rhine River. Bubonic plague continued to be a factor in the war. Beginning in 1634, Dresden, Munich, and smaller German communities such as Oberammergau recorded large numbers of plague casualties. In the last decades of the war, both typhus and dysentery had become endemic in Germany.



We view the Thirty Years Wars as the defining Wars in the Albinos efforts to remove Blacks from Europe and end Black Hegemony in Europe. That because by this time, the Americas provided a place to send civilian survivors and prisoners of war. But there were many other wars in Europe which directly, or indirectly, furthered the Albino cause of Black eradication.

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1066 Norman Conquest
1096 - 1291 Crusades
1096 - 1099 First Crusade
1101 Crusade of 1101
1147 - 1149 Second Crusade
1187 - 1191 Third Crusade
1202 - 1204 Fourth Crusade
1209 - 1229 Albigensian Crusade
1212 Children's Crusade (Often believed to be just a story)
1217 - 1221 Fifth Crusade
1228 Sixth Crusade
1248 - 1254 Seventh Crusade
1270 Eighth Crusade
1271 - 1291 Ninth Crusade
1293 - 1323 War between Sweden and Novgorod ended up with Treaty of Nöteborg
1296 - 1328 First War of Scottish Independence
1332 - 1333 Second War of Scottish Independence
1337 - 1453 Hundred Years' War
1341 - 1364 Breton War of Succession
1420 - 1436 Hussite Wars
1454 - 1466 Thirteen Years' War. Between Poland and Teutonic Knights, which finally broke the power of the latter.
1455 - 1485 Wars of the Roses
1474 - 1477 War between the Duchy of Burgundy and the Swiss Confederation
1478 - War between the Principality of Moscow and the Republic of Novgorod. The latter was conquered.
1494 - 1559 Italian Wars
1494 - 1498 Charles VIII's Italian War
1499 - 1500 Louis XII's war with Milan
1500 - 1502 Franco-Spanish Conquest of Naples
1502 - 1505 Franco-Spanish War over Naples
1508 - 1510 War of the League of Cambrai
1510 - 1513 War of the Holy League
1511 - 1514 Anglo-French War
1513 Anglo-Scottish War (Battle of Flodden)
1515 - 1516 Francis I's first Italian war
1521 - 1525 First war of Francis and Charles V
1521-1525 Anglo-French War
1526 - 1529 War of the League of Cognac
1536 - 1538 Third War of Francis and Charles
1542 - 1544 Last War of Francis and Charles
1542 - 1546 Anglo-French War
1542 - 1550 Anglo-Scottish War
1549 - 1550 Anglo-French War
1552 - 1559 Last Italian War
1557 - 1559 Anglo-French War
1495 - 1497 Russo-Swedish War
1499 - 1503 Turkish-Venetian War1509 - 1513 Ottoman Civil War
1514 - 1516 Ottoman-Safavid War
1515 - 1523 Rebellion of the Frisians
1516 - 1517 Ottoman-Mamluk War
1521 - 1523 The Swedish War of Liberation
1521 - 1523 Uprising of the Comuneros in Castile
1521 - 1526 Ottoman-Hungarian War
1522 Ottoman Conquest of Rhodes
1522 The Knights' War in Germany
1524 - 1525 The Peasants' War in Germany
1526 - 1528 Hungarian Civil War
1526 - 1555 Ottoman-Safavid War
1528 - 1533 Ottoman-Habsburg War in Hungary
1531 Swiss Civil War between Zürich and the Catholic cantons
1532 - 1546 Ottoman-Habsburg War in the Mediterranean
1533 - 1536 The Counts' War in Denmark
1537 - 1544 Renewed Ottoman-Habsburg War in Hungary
1546 - 1547 Schmalkaldic War
1551 - 1562 Ottoman-Habsburg War in Hungary
1551 - 1581 Ottoman-Habsburg War in the Mediterranean (Battle of Lepanto (1571))
1552 - 1555 Charles V's war with Maurice of Saxony
1554 - 1557 Great Russian War
1557 - 1571 Livonian War
1559 - 1560 Scottish Rebellion against the French
1562 - 1598 Wars of Religion in France, also called War of the Three Henries or Huguenot Wars


1562 - 1563 First War of Religion
1567 - 1568 Second War of Religion
1568 - 1570 Third War of Religion
1572 - 1573 Fourth War of Religion
1575 - 1576 Fifth War of Religion
1576 - 1577 Sixth War of Religion
1580 Seventh War of Religion (Lovers' War)
1585 - 1598 Eighth War of Religion
1589 - 1598 Franco-Spanish War
1562 - 1568 Ottoman-Habsburg War in Hungary
1563 - 1570 Northern Seven Years' War also known as Dano-Swedish War
1566 (or 1568) - 1648 Eighty Years' War (war of Dutch independence)
1566(or 1568) - 1609 First Phase
1621 - 1648 Second Phase
1567 - 1573 Scottish Civil War
1568 - 1571 Morisco Revolt in Spain
1570 - 1595 Twenty-five Years' War between Sweden and Russia
1577 - 1582 Livonian War (Poland vs. Russia)
1577 - 1590 Turkish-Persian War
1580 - 1583 Portuguese Civil War
1585 - 1604 Anglo-Spanish War (Spanish Armada, 1588)
1590 - 1606 "Long War" between the Empire and the Turks
1594 - 1603 Tyrone Rebellion in Ireland
1596 - 1597 The Cudgel War in Finland
1600 - 1611 Polish-Swedish War
1602 - 1612 Turkish-Persian War
1609 - 1618 Russo-Polish War
1610 - 1617 Ingrian War between Sweden and Russia
1611 - 1613 War of Kalmar between Sweden and Denmark
1613 - 1617 Russo-Swedish War
1614 - 1621 Polish-Turkish War
1616 - 1618 Turkish-Persian War
1617 - 1629 Polish-Swedish War
1618 - 1648 Thirty Years' War across Europe, ends with the Peace of Westphalia.
1618 - 1625 Bohemian/Palatine Phase
1618 - 1629 Austro-Transylvanian War
1625 - 1629 Danish Phase
1625 - 1630 Anglo-Spanish War
1626 - 1630 Anglo-French War
1627 - 1631 War of the Mantuan Succession
1630 - 1635 Swedish Phase
1635 - 1648 French Phase
1635 - 1659 Franco-Spanish War (ending with the Treaty of the Pyrenees)
1645 Renewed Austro-Transylvanian War
1623 - 1638 Turkish-Persian War
1625 - 1629 Huguenot Uprising in France
1632 - 1634 Russo-Polish War
1634 Polish-Swedish War
1637 Pequot War
1639 - 1652 English Civil War
1639 First Bishops' War
1640 Second Bishops' War
1641 - 1650 Irish War
1642 - 1646 First Civil War
1648 Second Civil War
1650 - 1652 Scottish Uprising
1640 - 1656 Catalan Revolt
1640 - 1668 Portuguese War of Independence
1645 - 1670 Turkish-Venetian War
1648 - 1653 The Fronde
1648 - 1649 First Fronde
1650 - 1653 Second Fronde
1648 - 1660 The Deluge/Northern Wars, A series of wars involving Poland, Sweden, Brandenburg, Russia and Transylvania and Denmark
1648 - 1654 Cossack Revolt against Poland
1654 - 1656 Russo-Polish War
1655 - 1656 Swedish-Brandenburg War
1655 - 1660 Polish-Swedish War
1656 - 1658 Russo-Swedish War
1656 - 1660 Danish-Swedish War
1657 - 1660 Dutch-Swedish War
1658 - 1667 Russo-Polish War
1652 - 1654 First Anglo-Dutch War
1656 - 1659 Anglo-Spanish War
1657 - 1662 Turkish-Transylvanian War
1662 - 1664 Austro-Turkish War


1665 - 1667 Second Anglo-Dutch War preceded by the capture of New Amsterdam, renamed New York City
1667 - 1668 War of Devolution
1671 - 1676 Polish-Turkish War
1672 - 1678 Dutch War
1672 - 1674 Third Anglo-Dutch War
1672 - 1679 War between Brandenburg and Sweden
1675 - 1679 Scanian War between Sweden and Denmark
1675 - 1676 King Philip's War
1678 - 1681 Russo-Turkish War
1682 - 1699 War of the Holy League (Austria, Venice, and Poland vs. Ottomans
1685 Monmouth's Rebellion
1688 - 1697 War of the Grand Alliance
1689 - 1691 Irish Jacobite Uprising
1695 - 1700 Russo-Turkish War
1700 - 1721 Great Northern War between a coalition of Denmark/Norway, Russia and Saxony/Poland on one side and Sweden on the other side
1710 - 1711 Russo-Turkish War, 1710-11, a part of the Great Northern War
1715 - 1717 Polish revolt against King Augustus II
1701 - 1714 War of Spanish Succession
1702 - 1713 Queen Anne's War The North American part of the War of Spanish Succession
1703 - 1711 Hungarian Revolt
1714 - 1718 Turko-Venetian War
1715 - 1716 Jacobite Rebellion also known as "The Fifteen"
1716 - 1718 Austro-Turkish War
1718 - 1720 War of the Quadruple Alliance
1722 - 1723 Russo-Persian War 1722-1723
1722 - 1727 Turco-Persian War
1727 - 1729 largely bloodless Spanish war with England and France
1730 - 1736 Turco-Persian War
1733 - 1738 War of the Polish Succession
1736 - 1739 Russo-Turkish War
1737 - 1739 Austro-Turkish War
1740 - 1748 War of the Austrian Succession
1739 - 1748 War of Jenkins' Ear
1740 - 1742 1st Silesian War
1741 - 1743 Hats' Russian War between Sweden and Russia
1744 - 1748 King George's War The North American part of the War of Austrian Succession
1744 - 1745 2nd Silesian War
1744 - 1748 First Carnatic War
1745 - 1746 "The Forty-five"
1743 - 1747 Turco-Persian War
1749 - 1754 Second Carnatic War
1756 - 1763 Seven Years' War, known as the French and Indian War in the United States, and also 3rd Silesian War
1761 - 1763 Spanish-Portuguese War
1763 - 1766 Pontiac's Rebellion
1768 - 1774 Russo-Turkish War
1768 - 1776 War of the Confederation of Bar in Poland
1773 - 1774 Pugachev's Rebellion
1774 - 1783 First Anglo-Maratha War
1775 - 1783 American Revolutionary War
1778 - 1783 Anglo-French War
1779 - 1783 Anglo-Spanish War
1780 - 1784 Anglo-Dutch War
1777 - 1779 War of the Bavarian Succession
1785 - 1787 Dutch Civil War
1787 - 1791 Austro-Turkish War
1787 - 1792 Russo-Turkish War
1788 - 1790 Gustav III's Russian War also known as Russo-Swedish War
1791 - 1804 Haiti Revolutionary War
1792 War in defence of the constitution in Poland
1792 - 1802 French Revolutionary Wars
1792 - 1797 War of the First Coalition
1792 - 1795 Franco-Prussian War
1792 - 1797 Franco-Austrian War
1793 - 1795 Franco-Spanish War
1793 - 1795 Franco-Dutch War
1793 - 1802 Franco-British War
1798 - 1801 War of the Second Coalition
1798 - 1799 Franco-Russian War
1799 - 1801 Franco-Austrian War
1798 - 1801 Quasi War
1794 Kosciuszko Uprising in Poland
1795 - 1798 United Irishmen Revolt

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Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
No one is being fooled by the lame BS you are pushing.

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Climate change affected the fall of the Roman Empire


Studying old trees in the Altai mountains allowed reconstructing Eurasia summer temperatures over the last 2,000 years. Photo: Vladimir S. Myglan.


NEW RESEARCH FROM FUTURE EARTH CORE PROJECT PAGES SUGGESTS LINKS BETWEEN THE CENTURY-LONG "LATE ANTIQUE LITTLE ICE AGE" IN EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA WITH FAMINE, LARGE-SCALE MIGRATION, A PLAGUE PANDEMIC THAT RIPPED THROUGH THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE, AND THE EXPANSION OF THE ARAB EMPIRE.


Researchers from the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project write in the journal Nature Geoscience that THEY HAVE IDENTIFIED AN UNPRECEDENTED, LONG-LASTING COOLING IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE 1500 YEARS AGO. THE DROP IN TEMPERATURE IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED THREE LARGE VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS IN QUICK SUCCESSION IN THE YEARS 536, 540 AND 547 AD (ALSO KNOWN AS THE COMMON ERA OR CE). VOLCANOES CAN CAUSE CLIMATE COOLING BY EJECTING LARGE VOLUMES OF SMALL PARTICLES – SULFATE AEROSOLS – THAT ENTER THE ATMOSPHERE BLOCKING SUNLIGHT.

THE FINDINGS OF THE STUDY HAVE BEEN LARGELY COVERED BY INTERNATIONAL MEDIA, SUCH AS THE NEW SCIENTIST AND THE WASHINGTON POST. THE LATTER POINTS OUT THAT THIS MIGHT BE SOME OF THE STRONGEST EVIDENCE OF A DIRECT LINK BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND MONUMENTAL SHIFTS IN CIVILISATIONS ACROSS ENTIRE REGIONS.

WITHIN FIVE YEARS OF THE ONSET OF THE "LATE ANTIQUE LITTLE ICE AGE", AS THE RESEARCHERS HAVE DUBBED IT, THE JUSTINIAN PLAGUE PANDEMIC SWEPT THROUGH THE MEDITERRANEAN BETWEEN 541 AND 543 AD, STRIKING CONSTANTINOPLE AND KILLING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING CENTURIES. THE AUTHORS SUGGEST THESE EVENTS MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE DECLINE OF THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE.

"WITH SO MANY VARIABLES, WE MUST REMAIN CAUTIOUS ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSE AND POLITICAL EFFECT, BUT IT IS STRIKING HOW CLOSELY THIS CLIMATE CHANGE ALIGNS WITH MAJOR UPHEAVALS ACROSS SEVERAL REGIONS," ADDED BÜNTGEN.

THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH TEAM MADE UP OF CLIMATOLOGISTS, NATURALISTS, HISTORIANS AND LINGUISTS MAPPED THE NEW CLIMATE INFORMATION AGAINST A PARTICULARLY TURBULENT PERIOD IN HISTORY IN EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA. THE VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS PROBABLY AFFECTED FOOD SUPPLIES – A MAJOR FAMINE STRUCK THE REGION AT PRECISELY THIS TIME FOLLOWED IMMEDIATELY BY THE PANDEMIC.



Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age (550-700 CE).


FURTHER SOUTH, THE ARABIAN PENINSULA RECEIVED MORE RAIN ALLOWING MORE VEGETATION TO GROW. THE RESEARCHERS SPECULATE THIS MAY HAVE DRIVEN EXPANSION OF THE ARAB EMPIRE IN THE MIDDLE EAST BECAUSE THE VEGETATION WOULD HAVE SUSTAINED LARGER HERDS OF CAMELS USED BY THE ARAB ARMIES FOR THEIR CAMPAIGNS.

IN COOLER AREAS, SEVERAL TRIBES MIGRATED EAST TOWARDS CHINA, POSSIBLY DRIVEN AWAY BY A LACK OF PASTURELAND IN CENTRAL ASIA. THIS LED TO HOSTILITIES BETWEEN NOMADIC GROUPS AND THE LOCAL RULING POWERS IN THE STEPPE REGIONS OF NORTHERN CHINA. AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN THESE STEPPE POPULATIONS AND THE EASTERN ROMANS BROUGHT DOWN THE SASANIAN EMPIRE IN PERSIA, THE FINAL EMPIRE IN THE REGION BEFORE THE RISE OF THE ARAB EMPIRE.


LARGE VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS CAN AFFECT GLOBAL TEMPERATURE FOR DECADES. THE RESEARCHERS SUGGEST THAT THE SPATE OF ERUPTIONS COMBINED WITH A SOLAR MINIMUM, AND OCEAN AND SEA-ICE RESPONSES TO THE EFFECTS OF THE VOLCANOES, EXTENDED THE GRIP OF THE FREEZING CLIMATE FOR OVER A CENTURY.


The research is part of the Euro-Med2k working group of the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project. Last week (29 January 2016), MEMBERS OF THE GROUP PUBLISHED ACOMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF SUMMER TEMPERATURES IN EUROPE IN THE LAST 2000 YEARS, CONCLUDING THAT CURRENT SUMMER TEMPERATURES ARE UNPRECEDENTED DURING THIS PERIOD. FUTURE EARTH SUPPORTED THE COMMUNICATION EFFORTS AROUND THE PUBLICATION OF THIS STUDY.

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FALL OF THE LATE ROMAN EMPIRE


Compiled by Lewis Loflin



THE EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS OF 535-536 WERE THE MOST SEVERE AND PROTRACTED SHORT-TERM EPISODES OF COOLING IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE IN THE LAST 2,000 YEARS. THE EVENT IS THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN CAUSED BY AN EXTENSIVE ATMOSPHERIC DUST VEIL, POSSIBLY RESULTING FROM A LARGE VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN THE TROPICS, OR DEBRIS FROM SPACE IMPACTING THE EARTH. ITS EFFECTS WERE WIDESPREAD, CAUSING UNSEASONAL WEATHER, CROP FAILURES AND FAMINES WORLDWIDE. (WIKI)

THIS CAME AT A TIME EMPEROR JUSTINIAN WAS RECLAIMING THE WESTERN EMPIRE FROM VARIOUS BARBARIAN TRIBES THAT OVERRUN THE AREA. YET IN HISTORY CLASS WHEN I READ THIS THE WHOLE SUBJECT WAS DROPPED WITHOUT EXPLANATION. The next thing we read was the Muslims were halted in France at the Battle of Tours (also called the Battle of Poitiers) in 732.

IN FACT WHAT WAS IT THAT REALLY CAUSED SO MUCH CHAOS IN THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE FROM THE END OF THE RULE OF MARCUS AURELIUS (180 AD ALSO CALLED END OF THE PAX ROMANA) TO THE "FALL" OF THE WEST AROUND 480 AD? BETTER YET, WHAT WAS IT THAT DROVE THE GERMANIC TRIBES OF NORTHERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE INTO THE ROMAN WEST? THE ANSWER IT SEEMS WAS CLIMATE CHANGE.

LOOKING AT THE CLIMATE CHART ABOVE A GENERAL COOLING TREND LASTING FIVE CENTURIES WOULD HAVE REAPED HAVOC ON AGRICULTURE IN MUCH OF EUROPE. THERE WERE ALSO A NUMBER OF PLAGUES THAT SWEPT THE EMPIRE AS A WEAKENED AND SICK POPULATION WOULD BE FAR MORE VULNERABLE. ADD POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND WAR IT WAS A RECIPE FOR RUIN.

ANOTHER MASSIVE BUT SHORT AND SEVERE COLD SNAP, PROBABLY CAUSED BY A VOLCANIC ERUPTION (535-536), OPENED THE DOOR TO THE BUBONIC PLAGUE. THE PLAGUE AND FAMINE DEVASTATED THE ROMAN AND PERSIAN EMPIRES, BUT SPARED ARABIA. BEGINNING IN EGYPT, THE PLAGUE WOULD BE CARRIED ON GRAIN SHIPS FROM BRITAIN TO THE BLACK SEA AND ALONG THE VAST AND STILL SURVIVING SYSTEM OF ROMAN ROADS. THE PLAGUE WOULD KILL MILLIONS AND CONTINUE TO ERUPT IN WAVES FOR YEARS. BY 632 ISLAM WOULD BEGIN ITS SWEEP OUT OF ARABIA AND DESTROY PERSIA AND MUCH OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE. See Chronology: Early Islam

ONLY DURING THE MEDIEVAL WARMING PERIOD WOULD CHRISTIAN EUROPE BEGIN THE COUNTER-ATTACK AGAINST ISLAM COMMONLY CALLED THE CRUSADES. THE BETTER CLIMATE ENABLED EUROPE TO RECOVER WHEN FARMING EXPANDED. THE VIKINGS ALSO WOULD BE ABLE SETTLE IN ICELAND AND GREENLAND. THE EARLY VICTORIES OF THE CRUSADERS HALTED AND TURNED BACK MUSLIM AGGRESSION FOR NEARLY 200 YEARS BETWEEN 1095 AND 1291.

TEMPERATURES SUDDENLY DROPPED AGAIN AROUND 1300 AND WITHIN 40 YEARS THE BLACK DEATH WOULD SWEEP IN FROM ASIA. THE VIKINGS WOULD SURVIVE IN GREENLAND UNTIL ABOUT 1600 WHEN A VERY SEVERE COLD PERIOD SET IN. AT THE SAME TIME SEVERE DROUGHT AND COLD RAVAGED EASTERN NORTH AMERICA AND KILLED MANY OF THE EARLY ENGLISH COLONISTS.



Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire circa 540 AD


The following are extracts of answers given by William Rosen author of Justinian's Flea Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe His website and ordering information are at www.justiniansflea.com.



Q: What were the consequences of the plague of Justinian?


THE BEST WAY I KNOW TO ANSWER THAT IS THIS: BETWEEN THE END OF THE 4TH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 6TH, THE ROMAN EMPIRE HAD LOST BRITAIN, SPAIN, FRANCE, AND ITALY TO A SERIES OF BARBARIAN INVASIONS. BETWEEN THE YEARS 532 AND 540, THE EMPIRE HAD RECONQUERED NORTH AFRICA, SOUTHERN FRANCE, ITALY, AND SPAIN, AND WAS A GOOD BET TO REESTABLISH ITSELF OVER ALMOST THE ENTIRE TERRITORY RULED BY AUGUSTUS. SIMILARLY, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, THE SASSANID PERSIAN EMPIRE WAS AT ITS ABSOLUTE APEX OF POWER AND WEALTH, RULING FROM PAKISTAN TO THE SHORES OF THE BLACK SEA.


THEN YERSINIA PESTIS ARRIVED. BEFORE THE 6TH CENTURY WAS OVER, IT HAD KILLED SOMEWHERE AROUND 25 MILLION PEOPLE, AND NEARLY KILLED THE EMPEROR JUSTINIAN HIMSELF. WITHIN DECADES, ROME AND PERSIA WERE SO PLAGUE-WEAKENED THAT THE ARMIES OF ISLAM, FORMED IN ONE OF THE ONLY PARTS OF EITHER EMPIRE TO REMAIN PLAGUE FREE, COULD CONQUER MESOPOTAMIA, THE MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA, SPAIN, AND MOST OF ASIA MINOR SO, WHILE IT WOULD BE WRONG TO SAY THAT WE KNOW THAT SOMETHING AS COMPLEX AS THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE WAS CAUSED BY A FLEA, IT IS EVEN MORE WRONG TO SAY THAT WE KNOW IT WASN'T.


OR, PUT ANOTHER WAY, HARD AS IT IS TO SAY PRECISELY HOW THE PANDEMIC CHANGED THE COURSE OF HISTORY, IT IS JUST PLAIN WRONG TO SUGGEST THAT SUBSEQUENT EVENTS WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SAME HAD IT NOT APPEARED.


Q: We've heard a lot recently about the way in which global warming/climate change may result in future epidemics; was there any relation between climate and the Plague of Justinian?

A NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES STUDY LAST YEAR ACTUALLY SHOWED A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WARMING AND THE PERCENTAGE OF RODENTS THAT BECOME INFECTED WITH THE PLAGUE BACTERIUM, PREDICTING UP TO A 50% INCREASE IN PREVALENCE IN PLACES LIKE CENTRAL ASIA. HOWEVER, SOMETHING THAT DEPENDS ON AS MANY FACTORS AS A PLAGUE EPIDEMIC IS MORE COMPLICATED.


THE SAME WEATHER THAT MAKES Y. PESTIS MORE INFECTIVE MAY LIMIT THE TRAVEL OF THE FLEAS THAT CARRY THEM. CASE IN POINT: ONE OF THE BEST GUESSES FOR THE ORIGIN OF THE DISEASE IS EAST AFRICA; SOME PRETTY PERSUASIVE RESEARCH INDICATES THAT ONE OF THE EVENTS THAT PRECEDED ITS ARRIVAL AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE IN AD 540 WAS A SEVERAL YEARS-LONG WORLDWIDE DROP IN TEMPERATURE, PROBABLY CAUSED EITHER BY A COMET, OR BY A MASSIVE VOLCANIC ERUPTION...AND THE CHANGE MAY HAVE CAUSED THE FLEA-CARRYING RATS TO MIGRATE NORTH.


THE LESSON OF THE PLAGUE OF JUSTINIAN, PARTLY BECAUSE IT DEPENDS ON SUCH AN EXTRAORDINARILY UNLIKELY - AND EXTRAORDINARILY UNHAPPY - ALIGNMENT OF RATS, FLEAS, AND HUMANS MOVING THEM AROUND FAST ENOUGH THAT THEY CAN SPREAD INFECTION BEFORE THEY DIE THEMSELVES, IS THAT SMALL DISRUPTIONS IN ECOLOGICAL EQUILIBRIUM (WHAT WE USED TO CALL THE BALANCE OF NATURE) CAN HAVE BIG CONSEQUENCES.


SO, WHILE IT'S TOO MUCH TO SAY THAT OVERALL GLOBAL WARMING IS LIKELY TO BE THE CAUSE OF A NEW OUTBREAK OF BUBONIC PLAGUE, IT IS NOT SOMETHING WE OUGHT TO BE SANGUINE ABOUT.


Q: What about Islam and Persia?


A lot of modern-day Iranians obviously take a great deal of pride in their Persian imperial past...so much so that the movie 300 generated quite a lot of anger on behalf of folks who thought the movie defamed the Persians of Xerxes.


IN SOME WAYS, THEY ARE THE SUCCESSORS OF THOSE EMPIRES, BUT IT'S ALSO TRUE THAT WHEN THE ARMIES OF ISLAM CONQUERED THE SASSANID PERSIANS, AS A DIRECT CONSEQUENCE OF THE EVENTS DESCRIBED IN JUSTINIAN'S FLEA, THEY DID THEIR LEVEL BEST TO DESTROY EVERYTHING ABOUT ALL THOSE PERSIAN EMPIRES THAT PRECEDED THEM; THEY LEVELED THE PERSIAN'S CAPITAL CITY, BUILT BAGHDAD ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE TIGRIS, REMADE THE LANGUAGE, THE CALENDAR, PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING. I SUPPOSE IT'S A TESTIMONY TO THE SIZE OF THE SHADOW THAT THE PERSIAN EMPIRE CAST THAT IT'S STILL VISIBLE FIFTEEN CENTURIES AFTER IT WAS DESTROYED.


References below taken from Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750 Edited by Lester K. Little


A number of plagues are noted in the Roman Empire from the late 1st to 4th Centuries according to Little. This corresponds to a cold wet period:

WHAT CAME BEFORE WERE LETHAL EPIDEMICS TO BE SURE, BUT OF DISEASES THAT STILL LACK GENERALLY AGREED-UPON DIAGNOSES. THE MOST NOTABLE OF THESE WERE THE 'PLAGUE' AT ATHENS IN 430 BC DESCRIBED BY THUCYDIDES, IN WHICH PERICLES DIED, THE ANTONINE PLAGUE IN GALEN'S TIME THAT STRETCHED OVER MUCH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE BETWEEN 169 AND 194, IN WHICH MARCUS AURELIUS DIED, AND THAT OF A CENTURY LATER, BETWEEN 250 AND 270, IN WHICH ANOTHER EMPEROR, CLAUDIUS GOTHICUS, DIED. SMALLPOX, TYPHUS, AND MEASLES WERE MOST LIKELY THE DISEASES INVOLVED IN THOSE EPIDEMICS...


DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN 535-536 AND MASSIVE CROP FAILURES IN EUROPE, EGYPT THE ANCIENT BREAD BASKET OF THE MIDDLE EAST WAS ONCE AGAIN CALLED ON. THE PLAGUE STARTED THERE AND GOT EXPORTED EVERYWHERE. ONCE THE PESTILENCE GAINED A FOOTHOLD, IT CAME AGAIN AND AGAIN. TO QUOTE LITTLE:

THE PRINCIPAL GREEK SOURCE IS THE WORK OF THE HISTORIAN PROCOPIUS OF CAESAREA, WHO WAS PRESENT AT THE COURT OF JUSTINIAN IN CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE EARLY 540S. IN HIS PERSIAN WAR, PROCOPIUS SAYS WITH REFERENCE TO THIS TIME, "THERE WAS A PESTILENCE BY WHICH THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE CAME NEAR TO BEING ANNIHILATED... IT STARTED AMONG THE EGYPTIANS.


THEN IT MOVED TO PALESTINE AND FROM THERE SPREAD OVER THE WHOLE WORLD...IN THE SECOND YEAR IT REACHED BYZANTIUM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SPRING." HE SAYS THAT FOR THE MAJORITY OF THOSE STRICKEN THE ONSET OF FEVER WAS THE FIRST SIGN, AND THEN THERE DEVELOPED AFTER A FEW DAYS A BUBONIC SWELLING, EITHER IN THE GROIN, IN THE ARMPIT, OR BESIDE THE EARS. HE REPORTS THAT THE MORTALITY ROSE ALARMINGLY, EVENTUALLY REACHING MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND EACH DAY.

Procopius also mentions that the emperor himself was taken ill, but only in his Secret History did he go on to reveal that there were rumors at court that Justinian had died and that speculation about the succession flourished. Justinian, however, recovered and reigned for two more decades.


THE LAWYER AGATHIAS UNDERTOOK TO CONTINUE THE HISTORY OF PROCOPIUS. HE SAYS THAT AFTER 544 WHEN PLAGUE CEASED IN CONSTANTINOPLE, IT HAD NEVER REALLY STOPPED BUT SIMPLY MOVED ON FROM PLACE TO PLACE, UNTIL IT RETURNED TO THE CITY ALMOST AS THOUGH IT HAD BEEN CHEATED ON THE FIRST OCCASION INTO A NEEDLESSLY HASTY DEPARTURE.

THIS WAS THE SPRING OF 558, WHEN "A SECOND OUTBREAK OF PLAGUE SWEPT THE CAPITAL, DESTROYING A VAST NUMBER OF PEOPLE." THE FORM THE EPIDEMIC TOOK WAS NOT UNLIKE THAT OF THE EARLIER OUTBREAK.

A SWELLING IN THE GLANDS IN THE GROIN WAS ACCOMPANIED BY A HIGH FEVER THAT RAGED NIGHT AND DAY WITH UNABATED INTENSITY AND NEVER LEFT ITS VICTIM UNTIL THE MOMENT OF DEATH.

This seemed to be carried by ships:


[I]THE PORT OF ENTRY FOR THE DISEASE INTO GAUL IN THE FIRST PLACE, WE CAN ASSUME, WAS MARSEILLES, SINCE THE EARLIEST REPORT WE HAVE OF IT IN GAUL WAS IN THE RHONE VALLEY. WHILE GREGORY DID NOT MENTION MARSEILLES IN HIS PASSAGE ON THE OUTBREAK OF 543, HE HAS AN ASTONISHING TALE TO TELL OF THE ONE THERE IN 588, ASTONISHING FOR THE BITS OF ETIOLOGICAL INSIGHTS IT CONTAINS.


"A SHIP FROM SPAIN PUT INTO PORT WITH THE USUAL KIND OF CARGO, UNFORTUNATELY ALSO WITH IT THE SOURCE OF THIS INFECTION. QUITE A FEW OF THE TOWNSFOLK PURCHASED OBJECTS FROM THE CARGO AND IN LESS THAN NO TIME A HOUSE IN WHICH EIGHT PEOPLE LIVED WAS COMPLETELY DESERTED, ALL THE INHABITANTS HAVING CAUGHT THE DISEASE.


THE INFECTION DID NOT SPREAD THROUGH THE RESIDENTIAL QUARTER IMMEDIATELY. SOME TIME PASSED AND THEN, LIKE A WHEAT FIELD SET ON FIRE, THE ENTIRE TOWN WAS SUDDENLY ABLAZE WITH THE PESTILENCE... AT THE END OF TWO MONTHS THE PLAGUE BURNED ITSELF OUT. THE POPULATION RETURNED TO MARSEILLES, THINKING TO BE SAFE. THEN THE DISEASE STARTED AGAIN AND ALL WHO HAD COME BACK DIED. ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS LATER ON MARSEILLES SUFFERED FROM AN EPIDEMIC OF THIS SORT."

THE BLACK DEATH WAS ONE OF THE DEADLIEST PANDEMICS IN HUMAN HISTORY, PEAKING IN EUROPE BETWEEN 1348 AND 1350. IT IS WIDELY THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN AN OUTBREAK OF BUBONIC PLAGUE CAUSED BY THE BACTERIUM YERSINIA PESTIS.


USUALLY THOUGHT TO HAVE STARTED IN CENTRAL ASIA, IT HAD REACHED THE CRIMEA BY 1346 AND FROM THERE, PROBABLY ON MERCHANT SHIPS, IT SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE MEDITERRANEAN AND EUROPE.


THE BLACK DEATH IS ESTIMATED TO HAVE KILLED 30% TO 60% OF EUROPE'S POPULATION, REDUCING THE WORLD'S POPULATION FROM AN ESTIMATED 450 MILLION TO BETWEEN 350 AND 375 MILLION IN 1400. THIS HAS BEEN SEEN AS CREATING A SERIES OF RELIGIOUS, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC UPHEAVALS WHICH HAD PROFOUND EFFECTS ON THE COURSE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY.


THE PLAGUE RETURNED AT VARIOUS TIMES, RESULTING IN A LARGER NUMBER OF DEATHS, UNTIL IT LEFT EUROPE IN THE 19TH CENTURY. (WIKI)


AFTER THE COOLING OF THE MEDIEVAL WARMING PERIOD AND A SEVERE COLD SNAP IN THE EARLY 1300S, THE PLAGUE REAPPEARED. UNLIKE THE EARLIER PANDEMIC THAT SPARED ARABIA:

THE SECOND PANDEMIC, WELL KNOWN TO ALL READERS OF HISTORY AS THE "BLACK DEATH," ERUPTED IN CENTRAL ASIA IN THE 1330S, REACHED THE CRIMEA BY 1346, AND THEN MOVED ON THE FOLLOWING YEAR TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND THENCE TO PORTS ALL AROUND THE MEDITERRANEAN.


IT SPREAD MORE WIDELY AND MOVED FURTHER INLAND THAN IT HAD EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE, FOR EXAMPLE, BY REACHING SCANDINAVIA AND ALSO FAR INTO THE ARABIAN PENINSULA FOR THE FIRST TIME. FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY AND A HALF IT CONTINUED TO RECUR WITH NOTABLE REGULARITY, BUT THEN BECAME SPORADIC, THOUGH STILL DEADLY, VANISHING FROM EUROPE IN 1772, BUT LINGERING IN THE NEAR EAST UNTIL THE 1830S.

THIS PLAGUE TOO WAS CARRIED ON SHIPS AND EMERGED FROM SEAPORTS THAT NOW COVERED EVEN LARGER AREAS.

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quote:

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Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova:
Let's see......

No you haven't really disproved anything I said in this thread at all, in terms OF THE MAIN IDEA OF THE LITTLE ICE AGE EVENT BEING A MAJOR DEPOPULATION AND POPULATION ELIMINATION/ERADICATION EVENT IN EUROPE WHEN IT TOOK PLACE! Yes the little Ice age DID INDEED play a MAJOR part in helping eliminate and destroy Black European populations from that date in time as well as various other factors; AND YES EUROPE WAS DENSELY POPULATED BY BLACKS AS MY OTHER PROOF'S ABOVE THAT I HAVE SHOWN!


EUROPE WAS DENSELY AS EARLY AS THE NEOLITHIC TIME PERIOD, WHEN FARMING AND AGRICULTURE WAS FIRST TRANSPORTED TO EUROPE FROM THE MIDDLE EAST REGION, RELATIVE TO THE TIME PERIOD OF DURING THE NEOLITHIC, TO THE ANCIENT GRECO-ROMAN PERIOD!

I have no doubt blacks were in Europe- just the Moors would show
that, not to mention earlier moves from Africa, and
via the Middle East. But you have provided no credible evidence
that all these blacks were "killed off" because of said Ice Age.
The burden of proof is on you to prove your claim.

You document things NOT at issue- such as a cold period, deaths in
some areas, or the presence of various blacks. None of these is at
issue. What is at issue is your notion of all "blacks" being killed off.
FOr one thing you have yet to define who a "black" is supposed
to be. Why do you skip over that? If you are classifying everyone
with a brown skin as "black" your argument is deeply flawed, for
brown southern Euros, Turks and Mongols can then be called "black."
This is a dubious "catch-all" category allowing you to shoehorn
whatever you want into them, but few would take such methods seriously.

Second, you have not given any number of these "blacks" floating
around Europe, and third you still have not shown specifically
where the ice age killed all these "blacks." Yes people died
during the Little Ice Age, but how many "blacks" died compared
to albinos? Were "black" death rates higher or lower than the whites?
In what areas were the black doom rates higher? You
have put nothing serious on the table showing these numbers.
If you had said SOME blacks were affected fine, but you go
making these sweeping statements.

As I explained in this thread, so there you got it you got outside disasters and plagues and this completely shook Black Europe to their knees, once that happened Europe was ripe for the picking for Albino's.

You still have not adequately answered Mike's question as to why
the disasters would mostly affect blacks. And Albino Europe was
doing pretty well by the LIA without needing many blacks. The
Germanic and Celtic peoples lagged behind say Egypt, Nubia etc
in ancient time, but by the LIA starting 1150AD had developed
elaborate cultures as any textbook shows. The albinos did not have
to "wait for the blacks to die off."

Once disasters like this occurred, these major agrarian system collapsed, thus this killed off major numbers of the populations of these towns and cities which were again, which I don't dispute, mostly filled with black/brown skinned people; since after all it was blacks/browns that built the towns and civilizations of old Europe and not the Germanic/Slavic barbarian tribes in antiquity.

This is so ludicrous that it smacks of yet another troll strawman,
after which you will go to some other forum and talk about the "crazy ideas"
that "the Afrocentrics" on ES "believe." People are already on
to this idiotic game. It won't work anymore. And anyone coming to ES
and going the the discussions can see the fake setup of alleged "crazies"
is sheer nonsense.

And in fact the Germanic and Slavic peoples had plenty of towns in
place BEFORE the LIA, as did the Romans, Greeks and other Southern Euros.
Just a look at pre-roman Britain for example shows numerous towns
as in pre-Roman Germany. Errors are so obvious..
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/159526011779875793/
No one is being fooled by the lame BS you are pushing.

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
MIndovermatter, looking at all the wars in Europe is it possible that whites somehow misusing lost weather altering technologies stolen from ancient black civilizations brought on the little ice age artificially and that the blacks got mad and it led to wars?
You don't actually think Stonehenge was just a religious temple ?

Also zarahan points to the tropical adaptations of blacks who were not as mixed as today, even less hairy back then and they might have been like "we know what the fuk you're trying to do"

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Fall of Roman Empire linked to wild shifts in climate

By Michael Marshall



Centuries of unpredictable climate may have been partly to blame for the fall of the western Roman Empire. A detailed record of 2500 years of European climate has uncovered several links between changing climate and the rise and fall of civilisations.

Climate fluctuation was a contributing factor alongside political failures and barbarian invasions, says Ulf Büntgen of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, who led the project.

Büntgen used tree rings to build up a history of European climate. Using nearly 9000 samples from oak, pine and larch, Büntgen and colleagues were able to reconstruct how temperatures and rainfall in western Europe changed over the last 2500 years.


Climate flips and Black Death


From AD 250 to 550, the climate flipped, from one decade to the next, between dry and cool, and warm and wet. “Such decadal changes seem to have the most impact” on civilisations, Büntgen says, because they harm agriculture but are not prolonged enough for people to adapt their behaviour.

The climatic turmoil coincided with political upheaval and waves of human migrations. By AD 500, the western Roman Empire had fallen.

In other notable periods, the relatively stable medieval society was characterised by more constant climatic conditions. But the Black Death coincided with a wet spell and the disease spreads faster in humid conditions.


Cold wars


“Relatively modest changes in European climate in the past have had profound implications for society,” says Michael Mann of Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania.

Other studies have shown how war and climate are often intimately tied. For example, periods of unusually cold weather in China during the last millennium are thought to be linked to major bouts of warfare.

That said, it is difficult to draw conclusions for the present day from studies like Büntgen’s. As Halvard Buhaug of the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway points out: “Modern societies are not nearly as dependent on the climate, because trade and technology can mitigate its effects.”

Whether or not African civil wars today can be linked to modern climate change is the subject of intense debate.


Huge sample size


Büntgen and his colleagues used over 7284 oak tree samples from low-lying areas of France and Germany to obtain a record of spring rainfall, and 1089 Stone pines samples and 457 larches samples from high in the Austrian Alps to determine summer temperatures.

Others, including Mann, have used similar methods to put together detailed reconstructions of global temperatures during the last 1000 years. Going back 2500 years is “a very substantial contribution,” says Mann.

[sources/links in the article]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526135-500-climate-change-linked-to-a-millennium-of-war-in-china

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223221-400-end-of-an-empire-blame-it-on-the-weather

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12393-black-death-casts-a-genetic-shadow-over-england/

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/35/13110

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong


Journal reference: Science, DOI:
10.1126/science.1197175

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Could Climate Change Have Led To The Fall Of Rome?



Ruins of the Villa of the Quintilii on the outskirts of Rome


Rome may have fallen hundreds of years ago, but much of the civilization the Romans built still dots the landscape today. One team of scientists recently unearthed a different kind of Roman artifact that may hold a strange clue to the empire's downfall.

A study of tree rings recently published in the journal Science provides evidence of climate shifts that, perhaps not coincidentally, occurred from A.D. 250 to 550, a period better known as the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ulf Buentgen and his team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research collected tree-ring data from ancient wood found in medieval castles and Roman ruins. They created a detailed history of climate change over the past 2.5 millennia and found the data point to the end of the Roman Empire as a period of exceptional climate change.

Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State, was not a member of the research team, but explains how the information found in tree rings changes what we know of the last centuries of Roman imperialism.

"They were able to tease out two pieces of information from these trees," Mann explains. "They can get some idea of how warm the summers were, and how wet the sort of late-spring/early summer was."

That's because trees create a new ring each year. A big ring occurs in times of good climate, and a small ring occurs in years of drought or extreme temperatures. Wood samples from this time period show a climate flip-flopping unpredictably, which would have been bad for the Roman Empire.

"Like any large civilization — including the civilization we have today — it was highly dependent on predictability of natural resources," Mann says. "It was very heavily adapted to the climate conditions that had persisted for centuries."

But while the tree rings show variability, there is no data for why these climate changes occurred. Global warming contributes to modern climate change, but Rome fell from power long before industrialization.

"Presumably it was some combination of these external natural factors like solar variability and volcanic eruptions, and just the pure sort of chaotic variability of the climate system," Mann speculates.

This new research may not establish cause-and-effect, but it does contribute another factor to explain Rome's fall. It also creates another clue for scientists sleuthing their way into an uncertain climate future.

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End of an empire? Blame it on the weather

By Betsy Mason


BAD weather may have triggered the fall of the Roman Empire. When the Visigoths and other northern barbarians upped sticks and headed south into Roman territory in the 5th century it might have been to escape the cold and poor harvests.

Waning sunspot activity is a symptom of a weakened Sun, which could make the
world cool by around half a degree.

Meteorologist Kevin Pang found that sunspots
were conspicuously absent from the historical record. “That was just about the time the Roman Empire fell in 476,” he says. The gaps in sunspot sightings coincided with high levels of carbon-14 in tree rings—another indicator of
fainter solar activity—he told the American Geophysical Union last week.

Pang thinks the resulting change in climate could have indirectly caused the end of the Romans’ dominance in Europe. “In the northern latitudes, a half a degree of cooling can shorten the growing season just enough to make crops fail,” he says. That might have sent the barbarians south into the Roman Empire.



And it might have been even colder according to another study published earlier this month (Science, vol 294, p 2149). Researchers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland developed a computer model of the effects of a
weakened Sun, and found that while global temperatures would only drop by half a
degree, regional cooling would be greater—perhaps by two degrees in Europe
during the winter.

Earth scientist Michael Rampino of New York University says the idea is
plausible.

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Black Death casts a genetic shadow over England


Black Death as illustrated in a 15th century bible


The Black Death continues to cast a shadow across England. ALTHOUGH THE MODERN ENGLISH POPULATION IS MORE COSMOPOLITAN THAN EVER, THE PLAGUES KNOWN AS THE BLACK DEATH KILLED SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE AGES THAT, TO THIS DAY, GENETIC DIVERSITY IS LOWER IN ENGLAND THAN IT WAS IN THE 11TH CENTURY, ACCORDING TO A NEW ANALYSIS.


RUS HOELZEL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM, UK AND HIS COLLEAGUES LOOKED AT THE MITOCHONDRIAL DNA FROM HUMAN REMAINS AT 4TH AND 11TH CENTURY ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES IN ENGLAND, AND COMPARED THEM TO SAMPLES FROM THE MODERN POPULATION STORED ON DNA DATABASES SUCH AS GENBANK. THEY FOUND THERE WAS MORE VARIATION IN THE ANCIENT MITOCHONDRIAL DNA SEQUENCES THAN IN MODERN SEQUENCES.


HOELZEL THINKS RANDOM GENETIC DRIFT MAY HAVE LOWERED GENETIC DIVERSITY NATURALLY. BUT THE LARGE UNEXPECTED DROP IN DIVERSITY WAS MORE LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN CAUSED BY POPULATION CRASHES FOLLOWING MAJOR OUTBREAKS OF THE BLACK DEATH IN ENGLAND DURING THE 1340S AND THE 1660S.


“THE MAIN FACTORS IN SUPPORT OF A ROLE FOR PLAGUE ARE THE TIMING AND THE FACT THAT IT AFFECTED DIFFERENT FAMILIES [TO A DIFFERING DEGREE],” SAYS HOELZEL.
Vulnerable families

The Black Death did not reach England UNTIL THE MID-14TH CENTURY. NO-ONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT CAUSED IT, WITH THE BUBONIC PLAGUE BACTERIUM YERSINIA PESTIS, AND VARIOUS VIRUSES ALL HAVING BEEN IMPLICATED AT SOME POINT.

HOWEVER, IT IS KNOWN THAT PLAGUE AFFECTED SOME FAMILIES MORE THAN OTHERS, SO THEIR MITOCHONDRIAL DNA WOULD HAVE BEEN LESS COMMON AMONG SURVIVORS, HOELZEL SAYS.


“I’M NOT AT ALL SURPRISED WITH THE RESULT,” SAYS SUSAN SCOTT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, UK. “WE’RE TALKING ABOUT ONE OF THE WORST DISASTERS HUMANS HAVE FACED. IT DESTROYED ABOUT HALF THE POPULATION OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE IN THREE YEARS.”


BUT THE EFFECTS MAY HAVE BEEN MOST SEVERE IN NORTHERN EUROPE. HOELZEL AND HIS TEAM NOTE THAT DNA SEQUENCES FROM MODERN ITALIANS ARE JUST AS VARIABLE AS THOSE FROM THEIR 7TH CENTURY ANCESTORS.


ACCORDING TO HOELZEL, THIS FINDING MAY REFLECT MIGRATION PATTERNS AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, RATHER THAN A LESS SEVERE OUTBREAK IN SOUTHERN EUROPE. “THROUGHOUT THE RECENT PAST, THERE HAVE BEEN MOVEMENTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST INTO SOUTHERN EUROPE, AND THE MIDDLE EAST POPULATION RETAINS A GREAT MIX AND DIVERSITY,” HE SAYS.

Effective measures

Scott has a different theory. “WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO WERE SUFFERING AT THE TIME,” SHE SAYS. “THE DISEASE CAME IN FROM SICILY AND SEEMED TO SETTLE IN FRANCE WHERE IT WAS ENDEMIC FOR ALMOST 200 YEARS.”


FRANCE WAS PROBABLY THE SOURCE OF THE PERIODIC EPIDEMICS ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE, AND THESE WERE INFREQUENT IN ITALY BECAUSE OF THE VIGILANT ACTIONS OF THE ITALIAN AUTHORITIES, SCOTT THINKS.


“THEY CLOSED DOWN PORTS AND STOPPED PEOPLE TRAVELLING AT THE FIRST SIGN OF INFECTION,” SHE SAYS. “AND THEY HAD A 40-DAY QUARANTINE PERIOD. I THINK THE BLACK DEATH WAS THE RESULT OF A VIRUS THAT PROBABLY HAD A 37-DAY INCUBATION AND INFECTION PERIOD, SO THE ITALIAN QUARANTINE PERIOD WAS JUST RIGHT.”


“IN ENGLAND, KING HENRY VIII REDUCED [THE QUARANTINE PERIOD] TO 30 DAYS AT ONE POINT, AND THE COUNTRY SUFFERED,” SAYS SCOTT.

Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0269).

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[b]Climate change may be responsible for the rise and fall of Roman empire, scientists find

Ours is not the first civilization to be threatened by climate change, scientists have established. It could also have been responsible for bringing down the Roman Empire.



Researchers who used tree growth rings to study the impact of unstable climate patterns found that they could be linked to historical events that have had devastating consequences.


Researchers who used tree growth rings to study the impact of unstable climate patterns found that they could be linked to historical events that have had devastating consequences.

Researchers who used tree growth rings to study climate patterns found that they could be matched to historical events that had devastating consequences.


Scientists discovered that periods of warm, wet weather coincided with prosperity while dry or varying conditions occurred at times of political turmoil, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the Thirty Years' War.


The researchers reconstructed the history of European summer climate for the last 2,500 years using 9,000 wooden artifacts.
Their results are based on measurements of tree-rings from the sub-fossil, archaeological, historical and living tree samples from Germany, France, Italy and Austria.


During good seasons, when water and nutrients were in plentiful supply, they found that trees formed broad rings.

But in less favorable growing conditions, the rings grew in much tighter formation.


The team of archaeologists, climatologists, geographers and historians then identified a link with prosperity levels in past societies.
“Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity,” they wrote on the Science journal website.


“Increased climate variability from 250-600AD coincided with the demise of the western Roman empire and the turmoil of the migration period.


“Distinct drying in the 3rd Century paralleled a period of serious crisis in the western Roman empire marked by barbarian invasion, political turmoil and economic dislocation in several provinces of Gaul.”


They also found that increased humidity was a perfect breeding ground for rodents during the plague.


Mr Buntgen noted that the results could help to build on future climate models and also act as a warning of how variations may affect society.


He said: "Our results will help us to be more cautious, taking into account that our modern civilization is not immune to climate change.

"For example, we can project it is likely that changes in precipitation and spatial redistribution of this will result in increased drought, which will impact our society – perhaps with migration and conflict due to limited water resources.


"We are very interested in understanding past civilizations and making our research more dense.


"There is room for improvement to get higher quality data and over a larger timescale.”

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quote:

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Climate and the Fall of the Roman Empire


Even in our modern age, humans are incredibly vulnerable to changes in weather and climate. And earlier in human history, we were even more so. Even the Romans, who managed to build monuments, roads and aqueducts that still stand today, weren't immune





Even in our modern age, humans are incredibly vulnerable to changes in weather and climate. And earlier in human history, we were even more so. Even the Romans, who managed to build monuments, roads and aqueducts that still stand today, weren't immune, according to a new study published last week by Science.


Scientists in Germany and Switzerland created a 2,500-year-long record of Central European summer precipitation and temperature variability from nearly 9,000 samples of larch, pine and oak tree rings.


They found that the region experienced above average precipitation and little temperature fluctuation up until about A.D. 250, with a couple of colder periods around 350 B.C.—when the Celtic peoples began to expand across the continent—and 50 B.C., which was when the Romans were conquering Britain.


But around A.D. 250 began a 300-year period of extreme climate variability, when there were wild shifts in precipitation and temperature from one decade to the next. The Romans didn't fare so well. The Roman Empire nearly fell during the Crisis of the Third Century and split into two in 285. In 387, the Gauls sacked Rome, followed by the Visigoths in 410 and the Vandals in 455. By 500, the western Roman Empire was gone.


"Relatively modest changes in European climate in the past have had profound implications for society," Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann told New Scientist.



Human history shows that we don't deal well with times of climate upheaval. If things are good or bad, we can adapt if given enough time. But a small change in climate can have deadly consequences. The study also found that the period around 1300 saw wetter summers and colder temperatures; it was about that time that Europe experienced a famine and plague of such immense size that nearly half the population died.


"The provocative outcome," of the study, University of Arkansas geoscientist David Stahle told ScienceNOW, "is that harsh climate conditions happen to be associated with upheavals in society, like the Black Death."

[sources used in the article]
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/secrets-of-the-colosseum-75827047/


http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/01/12/science.1197175

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19968-fall-of-roman-empire-linked-to-wild-shifts-in-climate

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/fall-of-rome-recorded-in-trees.html?ref=ra

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2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility


Abstract

Climate variations have influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of pre industrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution palaeoclimatic evidence.

Here, we present tree ring–based reconstructions of Central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration.

Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~AD 250 to 600 coincided with the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Historical circumstances may challenge recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.

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quote:

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Abstract.


Climatic changes during the first half of the Common Era have been suggested to play a role in societal reorganizations in Europe and Asia. In particular, the sixth century coincides with rising and falling civilizations, pandemics, human migration and political turmoil.


Our understanding of the magnitude and spatial extent aswell as the possible causes and concurrences of climate change during this period is, however, still limited. Here we use tree-ring chronologies from the Russian Altai and European Alps to reconstruct summer temperatures over the past two millennia.


We find an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling following a cluster of large volcanic eruptions in 536, 540 and 547 AD, which was probably sustained by ocean and sea-ice feedbacks, as well as a solar minimum. We thus identify the interval from 536 to about 660 AD as the Late Antique Little Ice Age.


Spanning most of the Northern Hemisphere, we suggest that this cold phase be considered as an additional environmental factor contributing to the establishment of the Justinian plague, transformation of the eastern Roman Empire and collapse of the Sasanian Empire, movements out of the Asian steppe and Arabian Peninsula, spread of Slavic-speaking peoples and political upheavals in China.

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quote:

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[Discussion of the book below]


Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe

by

William Rosen
(New York: Viking, 2007)


Summary:

Justinian’s Flea is divided into three sections, and opens with the story of the titular Emperor who reigned from 527 to 565 AD. Born in the Balkan region and of undistinguished background, Justinian moved to Constantinople as a young man. While tracing his rapid and improbable rise through the Imperial hierarchy, Justinian’s Flea also explores the Roman Empire of Justinian's day.

The Empire had radically transformed since the days of Augustus. Losing much of its territory to internal strife and barbarian invasion, the Empire had moved eastward, with its capital at Constantinople.


Multilingual and intensely Christian, Constantinople's popular politics and active, engaged citizenry facilitated Justinian's rise to power. Along the way he met Theodora, a prostitute and entertainer whom he would eventually marry.

The second section of the book details the achievements of Justinian's reign, beginning with his consolidation of political power. It also addresses in depth the construction of the Hagia Sophia, the stunning domed cathedral the Emperor built in Constantinople. Representing tremendous advancements in engineering and construction techniques, the Hagia Sophia became "the signature achievement of an entire age" (p. 118).


Justinian also actively pursued legal reforms, simplifying and consolidating Roman legal code into the Codex Justinianus, which would become the basis of the European Common Law tradition. Perhaps most importantly, Justinian began an aggressive campaign of imperial re-expansion. Led by a gifted general, Belisarius, Imperial troops began to re-conquer lost Roman territory around the Mediterranean, seemingly heralding a new golden age for the Roman Empire.

The third and final section of the book deals with the pandemic itself and its aftermath. Rosen gives a detailed explanation of the biology of the plague, its origins in Central Asia, and its spread to the Mediterranean world and to the Persian Seleucid Empire, which was Rome's chief international rival at the time.

The description of the pandemic itself spans both empires, and explores the horrific scope of the death and destruction — at one point, 5,000 people a day were dying in Constantinople alone. Justinian himself nearly died of the disease.

The plague didn't just take the lives of tens of thousands, but also caused political and social upheaval. Wracked by disease and weakened further by war, the Seleucid Empire nearly collapsed, and Rome was reduced to a shadow of its former glory.

This power vacuum paved the way for the later expansion of Islamic forces. Shielded from the plague by their relative isolation in the Arabian desert, Arabian armies would later be able to expand rapidly, laying the foundation for the modern Muslim world.

Rosen also speculates about a world in which Justinian's plague never occurred, and in which Justinian's empire continued to thrive and expand. He suggest that the rise of modern Europe, and the nation state, may stem directly from the collapse of the Roman Empire, and that the history of the Western world might have taken a very different shape had it not been for the pandemic.


How does the book depict the Roman Empire at the time of Justinian?


Justinian's Rome was not the Rome of Julius Caesar. The Empire had undergone a radical and often forced transformation, losing much of its former territory in Western Europe and North Africa. Having been forced off the Italian peninsula altogether, the Empire migrated eastward, settling its capital in the new city of Constantinople.


The city itself bears particular examination. Named for the first Christian emperor of Rome and home to half a million people at Justinian's time, the city was profoundly religious. Theological debates were popular entertainment, and nearly everyone appears to have taken part...


Outside of the capital city, the Empire's shift eastward had brought additional changes. The fabled legions of Rome in their iconic uniforms and formations were a thing of the past, replaced to a great degree with mercenaries recruited from the steppes to the east. After their service, these men found a place within the new Roman Empire:

By that time, Rome's policy was no longer to sow conquered ground with salt, but with retired servicemen. Illyricum was heavily colonized by ex-soldiers from the seventh legion who, while not ethnically Roman — most were from Spain, or Gaul, or Syria, or even Africa — had been granted ius italicum, the right of Roman citizens, as a reward for their service to the emperor.

That same long service had turned them all into Latin speakers, whatever the language of their homeland. Rome had rewarded her pensioners with homes in the Balkan highlands, and the new highlanders repaid loyalty with loyalty. (pp 17-18)


Just as the new Rome found itself populated with large numbers of non-Romans, the shift eastward had changed the Empire's relations with the rest of the world.

Rome found itself looking eastward, increasingly engaged with the Persian and Arabian worlds, and even the distant empire of China. The empire had adopted an eastern religion — Christianity — as its official faith. Officially an eastern European state, Rome also came under pressure from the nomadic tribes of the steppes.

Recruiting Hun mercenaries, Rome entered into an uneasy relationship with these barbarians. Whether in matters of politics, religion, or military recruitment, the Roman Empire's focus had permanently changed.


How do the events of Justinian's day continue to affect the contemporary world?


Justinian’s Flea outlines a slew of events, many of which directly shaped the world we live in today.

The Christian world was still in its formative years, and as such Justinian's actions directed the course that it would take. Most strikingly, the first division of the Christian world is a direct result of Justinian's time.


Tensions between ecclesiastical and political leadership, and between the eastern and western parts of the empire, began the split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches:


An emperor and a pope could not share the ecclesiastical leadership . . . So once the eastern churches, with Theodora's support, asserted doctrinal independence and the western Chalcedonian/Catholics gained political independence (a direct consequence of Justinian's inability to consolidate his victories in Italy and Spain), the future direction of the Church — Roman Catholicism in the west, various Eastern Orthodox rites in the east — was impossible to change. (p. 274)


The establishment of the Roman Catholic Church is a key development in the history of Europe, without which the continent would have developed very differently. One could also speculate that the cultural and political divide between Eastern and Western Europe also has its roots in these events, at least in part.

Justinian's reign and the pandemic changed Christianity, and also brought religious changes to the rest of the world. Shielded by their relative isolation, the tribes of Arabia never faced the devastation experienced by the Roman or Persian empires.


Those two behemoths, weakened by disease and war, lost much of their military power in the Middle East. As a result, a power vacuum appeared in the region, later to be filled by the rapidly expanding Muslim armies from the Arabian Peninsula. As a result, Islam spread rapidly, penetrating into Central Asia and North Africa, and eventually making inroads into Europe itself.


It is difficult to imagine that Islam would have become one of the worlds' major religions so rapidly and aggressively, had it not been for the opportunity presented following the pandemic.

The shape of the Islamic world was not the only thing determined by the events during and after the pandemic. In perhaps the most interesting part of the book, Rosen argues that had the pandemic not occurred and had Justinian's Rome held together, modern Europe would not have emerged.


. . . the demon not only midwifed Europe's birth but fed the population explosion that made the continent the center of historical gravity for a millennium: no pandemic, no labor shortage; no labor shortage, no agricultural revolution; and, therefore, no victory to Europe in the race for population domination.


(Not to forget the other bequests from Justinian to Europe's future dominance: the legal code that legitimated the autocratic European nation-state, and the great landed estates whose taxes paid for it). No Holy Roman Empire. No Crusades. No Hundred Year's War. No Inquisition. No European colonies. No Charlemagne, Napoleon, or Hitler. (pp. 322-23)


Rosen argues that without the events presented in Justinian’s Flea, the fall of Rome and the subsequent rise of the modern nation-state in Europe would not have occurred, or at least not in the same way. He draws a comparison to Rome's contemporary, the Chinese Empire, suggesting that had Rome not fallen, a European superstate might have persisted into the modern era


What aspects of Justinian's world allowed for the transmission of the plague?


The origins of Justinian's plague — and even the nature of the pathogen that caused it — are uncertain. While many scholars trace its beginnings to East Africa, the steppes of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent have also been suggested as possible points of origin. Regardless, the spread and transmission of the disease and the subsequent pandemic were shaped by the political and economic realities of Justinian's day.


A cursory examination of the map of the plague's spread presented in the text shows that the plague itself followed commercial routes across two empires and three continents (p. 220). Rosen's account of the plague's spread in the Middle East reads like a list of the great cities of biblical antiquity:


After Pelusium, as reported by John of Ephesus, the disease next arrived in the Mediterranean coastal city of Gaza in the last quarter of 541.

A dozen separate funerary inscriptions in the Negev city of Nessana (due south of Gaza along the route of one of the wadi, or shallow stream-beds, that crisscross the deserts of the Middle East) and Beersheba trace the southward journey of rats, fleas and bacteria throughout 541; while, simultaneously, the plague spread north, to the coastal cities of Askehlon, Ashdod, and Rehovot.


In early 542, a contemporary account describes the retreat of a Christian hermit to the Judean hills outside Jerusalem, an escape from the "great and most terrible mortality" that afflicted that holy city. Slightly later in 542, the city of Antioch, already looted and depopulated by Khusro's soldiers, now greeted an army of Y. Pestis . . . . (p. 246)


The plague reached these cities by following the widely-used trade routes that cross the region. Linking three continents and several empires, these trade networks represent an early form of globalization, and as such must be understood as the result of a multitude of political, economic, and social forces. For example, in describing the plague's spread into the Persian Seleucid Empire, Rosen takes into account historic relations between the Persia and Rome:


[T]erritory that so far remained plague-free was partially the result of the commercial restrictions between Rome and Sassanid Persia dating back to Diocletan.

Confining trade to designated free-trade zones like Nisbis and Callinicum limited Persia's exposure to the pestilence, whose most important vector, the black rat, stayed close to human commercial routes. (p. 248)


Due to the relatively high level of economic integration of the period, these trade routes became an effective vector of transmission for the disease, which swept across the Mediterranean and Persian worlds, eventually penetrating as far east as China by 682 AD. The plague's reliance on human mobility along trade routes resulted in one of its most interesting and lasting after-effects.


The tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, geographically and politically isolated, were spared the brunt of the plague which swept the "civilized world."

Rosen suggests that as a result, Arabian armies, driven by a new Revelation religion called Islam, were eventually able to penetrate into territory previously controlled by the large juggernaut empires to their north.


How does Rosen portray the other great empires of the time?



The foreign power with which Justinian's Rome had the most contact was the neighboring Persian Seleucid Empire. Spanning from the eastern border of Rome to the Indus River valley, the Persian Empire controlled a key section of the Silk Road, the main avenue for Far Eastern trade. Due to their close proximity, mutual reliance on the Silk Road trade, and convergent history, the two empires shaped each other.


As Rosen puts it: "By the fourth century, the two great empires were becoming more and more alike. It is perhaps too easy to find points of comparison between Rome and Persia in their last centuries . . ." (p. 232). Indeed, many of the forces that shaped imperial Persian society have direct counterparts in Roman history.

The choice of state religion proved key in the development of each empire. While Justinian's Rome was a Christian state, the Persians had adopted a different faith.


Zoroastrianism, perhaps the oldest revealed religion, had a dramatic effect on the internal relations of the Persian Empire. A dualistic faith, Zoroastrianism posits an eternal conflict between a supremely good deity, Ahura Mazda, and his evil counterpart, Ahriman. After being adopted by the Persians in the third century AD during the reign of the Emperor Bahram I, the new faith changed the Persian world:


As with Constantine's embrace of Christianity, the consequences were large. A new system of relatively immobile birth castes — priests, soldiers, scholars, and artisans — became state policy.

The "Letter of Tansar," popularly supposed to have been written by Bahram's chief priest, ordered "there shall be no passing from one [birth caste] to another unless in the character of one of us outstanding capacity is found."


Construction of some of the most distinctive architectural forms of the Sassanid period, the "fire shrines," which equated fire with light with good with Ahura Mazda, became a state imperative.


"Each king apparently had his own fire, lighted at the beginning of his reign, and this fire was on a portable fire altar." And, in Persia no less than Rome, a hierarchy of priests, or magi, like Christian bishops responsible for religious administration in geographic districts, accumulated significant political power. (pp. 232-33)



There are some obvious comparisons to the Roman world, perhaps most strikingly the intertwining of political and religious power in the hands of the bishops/magi. The architecture of religion, and its importance in the political realm, is another clear parallel.

Perhaps the most striking difference is the sanctioning of a nearly-immobile caste system. While it would be unfair to suggest that the Romans experienced a great degree of class mobility, they apparently had more than the Persians.

Justinian was a boy from the provinces, born into a poor family. His empress had been a prostitute and an actress before they married, and the couple went on to rule one of the mightiest empires in the world. Based on Rosen's description of Persian society, it is difficult to imagine similar events taking place in that empire.

Due to their geography, Persia and Rome had similar concerns about trade and international relations. Their mutual reliance on the Silk Road trade was a point of contention between the two empires. It also brought them into direct contact with another great empire of the day: China.


For the most part, Rosen limits discussion of China to the impact of the silk trade. However, the details he does include suggest an empire shaped by many of the same forces that affected Rome and Persia. China, too, shared a concern about nomadic tribes of raiders living beyond the pale of civilization. The nature of the silk trade meant that China was actively engaged in the events unfolding in Persia and Rome at the time.


As the Persian and Roman empires weakened, the power vacuum in the region paved the way for Islamic expansion, even into Central Asia. This brought Islam into contact with China's sphere of influence in the region, challenging the Middle Kingdom's traditional control.

source:

Rosen, William. Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.


Further Reading:

Nonfiction:

Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquest: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (De Capo Press, 2007)

For readers wanting further details about the rapid expansion of the Islamic world, Kennedy presents a fascinating popular account of the complex events of that time.

The Great Arab Conquest deals with the decline of the great Byzantine and Persian empires due to war and plague, the subsequent Arab military expansion, and the political and cultural legacy of the Muslim conquest.

Alessandro Barbero, The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle that Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire (Walker and Company, 2007)
Barbero focuses on the Battle of Adrianople, a relatively obscure event that he argues began the fall of the Roman Empire.


Taking place in 378 AD, this confrontation between Imperial troops and an army of Goths resulted in a resounding defeat for the Romans, the death of the Eastern Emperor, and set in motion a series of events that lead to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. With its focus on military history, The Day of the Barbarians is highly accessible, and explores the transformation of the Roman Empire and the creation of Justinian's world.

Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 (W. W. Norton, 1989)
Thorough and highly accessible, The World of Late Antiquity, explores the political and social changes that marked the end of the Classical period.


Discussing the falls of the Western Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, and the rise and expansion of Islam, Brown shows how these events shaped the world of late antiquity and divided the once-politically unified Mediterranean world into Catholic Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Muslim world.

Colin Wells, Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World (Delacorte Press, 2007)
Sailing to Byzantium traces the impact of Byzantine civilization on both the surrounding cultures of its day, and on its long-term contributions to the development of modern Europe.


The Byzantine Empire kept Classical learning alive, and was instrumental in the transmission of Classical knowledge to Western Europe during the Renaissance. Wells also details the cultural impact that the Byzantine Empire had on its neighbors, the Arabs, the Slavs, and Western Europe.

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And as many people here have confirmed and have stated, the Roman Byzantine empire was the stronghold of the original Black/colored Greco-Roman civilization at the onset of the Middle Ages.

We have a researcher stating that BOTH plague outbreaks and climate change, DECIMATED AND BROUGHT DOWN THE MIGHTY ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE PERSIAN EMPIRE AT SIMILAR TIME PERIODS SIMULTANEOUSLY!


So much so that that it left those two giant empires, super powers of their time period, and their regions, at the time, vulnerable and OPEN TO BARBARIAN MIGRATIONS AND INVASIONS OF THOSE EMPIRE'S REGIONS AND POPULATION CENTERS AND CITIES AND CAPITALS; such as the ARAB AND TURKISH BARBARIAN INVADERS etc etc!

And I keep repeatedly saying that this global cooling period event known as the little ice age DID THE EXACT SAME THING, WITH MEDIEVAL/CLASSICAL EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS, as the example of the Roman empire above illustrates!

And there is evidence in the sources I posted, as well as historical precedent's in the Roman empire example above, to SUPPORT MY POSITION! I really don't understand the hostility I am seeing here from some individuals when there are tons of sources like the above SIMPLY SUPPORTING AND HELPING ME IN THIS THREAD CONTINUOUSLY!
 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 
Byzantine Empire 330 AD
Date dissolved: 1453

____________________

prior:


Roman Bronze Portrait of Emperor Vespasian - X.0147
Origin: Mediterranean
Circa: 69 AD to 79 AD
Dimensions: 10.75" (27.3cm) high
Collection: Classical Antiquities
Style: Roman Imperial
Medium: Bronze


A bronze statue of Roman Emperor Hadrian from Tel Shalem,





Bronze head from a statue of the Roman emperor Augustus. Found in Meroë, Sudan, made in 27–25 BC.



Bronze Equestrian Statue of Augustus, National Museum Athens, Greece


[
Marcus Aurelius Equestrian Statue, Roma Capitoline Museums


[
Head from a bronze statue of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus (222-235 AD), from Ryakia, Archaeological Museum,
 

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Posted by Mike111 (Member # 9361) on :
 
^Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha,ha:

Albinos sure know how to make FAKES and lie!

.









 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 


Mike POS, show us a modern person with stringy hair like this, (note how it also wind swept back)


Mike you fraud, let's see what kind of lies you come up with
 

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Posted by DD'eDeN (Member # 21966) on :
 
Man, I just bought some got2be Glue hair spikey gel for my Mohawk, since I'm swimming so much these days, helps dry it quickly in humid Miami, my fluffy beard dries quickly.

http://www.target.com/p/got2b-glued-styling-spiking-glue-6-oz/-/A-13946484
 

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Posted by Mindovermatter (Member # 22317) on :
 
More sources corroborating and simply supporting my claims and positions in this thread:

http://buentgen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Buentgen_etal.2016_NatureGS.pdf

quote:

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Cooling and societal change during the Late
Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD..


Climatic changes during the first half of the Common Era have been suggested to play a role in societal reorganizations in Europe, and Asia. In particular, the sixth century coincides with rising and falling civilizations
,pandemics, human, migration and political turmoil.


Our understanding of the magnitude and spatial extent as well as the possible causes and concurrences of climate change during this period is, however, still limited. Here we use tree-ring chronologies from the Russian Altai and European Alps to reconstruct summer temperatures over the past two millennia.

We find an unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling following a
cluster of large volcanic eruptions in 536, 540 and 547 AD (ref. 14), which was probably sustained by ocean and sea-ice feed backs, as well as a solar minimum. We thus identify
the interval from 536 to about 660 AD as the Late Antique Little Ice Age.


Spanning most of the Northern Hemisphere, we
suggest that this cold phase be considered as an additional environmental factor contributing to the establishment of the Justinian plague
,transformation of the eastern Roman
Empire and collapse of the Sassanian Empire,
, movements out of the Asian steppe and Arabian Peninsula, spread of Slavic-speaking peoples and political upheavals in China.


Absence of precise climate reconstructions for large parts of central Asia has impeded accurate assessment of environmental
factors that may have driven momentous interactions between steppe pastoralists and peripheral sedentary civilizations.


At the same time, summer warmth between June and August (JJA) is known to control tree-ring formation at higher altitudes in
the Altai Mountains, where continental climate supports the preservation of dead wood on the ground. Despite a long history of habitation by pastoral nomads, 60% of this region
is still forested, with Siberian larch (Larix sibirica Ldb.) being the dominant species.



Although widespread steppe environments
constitute an enzootic wildlife reservoir for the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, it remains unclear whether historical pandemics
in Europe originated from natural infection foci in Asia, and what role climate might have played in their epidemic onset.

Moreover, root causes for human migrations out of the central Asian steppes between the fourth and seventh centuries AD have not been
unambiguously identified.


Of the 20 coldest central Asian (European) summers, occurred in the sixth century after 536 AD. Thirteen out of the 20 coldest decades in the Altai (Alpine) record fall in the sixth and seventh centuries.


Newly dated bipolar ice cores describe a large volcanic eruption at northern high latitudes in March 536 AD, which injected huge amounts of aerosol into the stratosphere (an estimated global forcing of −11.3 W m−2 ).


Another (tropical) eruption in 540 (−19.1 W m−2) exceeded the forcing of Tambora in April 1815 (−17.2 W m−2 ), and was followed by a smaller but still substantial eruption in 547 AD.


The abrupt summer cooling after this unique sequence of eruptions was probably sustained by positive feedback loops of ocean-heat content and sea-ice extension (Supplementary Information), with additional forcing probably contributed by the exceptional seventh-century. Of the 20 coldest central Asian (European) summers, 13 occurred in the sixth century after 536 AD. Thirteen out of the 20 coldest decades in the Altai (Alpine) record fall in the sixth and seventh centuries.


Newly dated bipolar ice cores describe a large volcanic eruption at northern high latitudes in March 536 AD, which injected huge amounts of aerosol into the stratosphere (an estimated global forcing of −11.3 W m−2 ).


Another (tropical) eruption in 540 AD exceeded the forcing of Tambora in April 1815, and was followed by a smaller but still substantial eruption in 547 AD.

The abrupt summer cooling after this unique sequence of eruptions was probably sustained by positive feedback loops of ocean-heat content and sea-ice extension, with additional forcing probably contributed by the exceptional seventh-century...


Solar minimum. As a result, the striking cold phase from 536 to ∼660 AD is hereafter termed the Late Antique Little Ice Age.


Independent evidence for this episode, which conceivably exceeded the severity of all cold events that occurred during the Little Ice Age is found in a wide range of diverse proxy archives from the Northern Hemisphere. Owing to changes in the Earth axis (a stronger inclination angle), extra-tropical summer short-wave insulation was higher than present, making the LALIA cooling even more outstanding.
Superposed epoch analyses centered on the 20 largest volcanic forcing’s of the AD detect distinct post eruption depressions in both the Alpine and Altai reconstructions.


Sharp and immediate summer cooling was stronger under the continental climate of central Asia in comparison with Europe where ocean-induced thermal inertia has a mitigating effect. Patterns of volcanic-driven summer cooling also differ in space and time.


Although the thermal shock after the cluster of eruptions in 536, 540 and 547 AD is evident in both reconstructions, the early-nineteenth century cooling after the unnamed eruption in 1809 and Tambora in 1815 is less prominent in the Altai. Cross-spectral analysis indicates maximum coherency between the Alpine and Altai records on longer timescales, which might be explained by a Eurasian-wide wave-train-like teleconnection.


The generally warmer conditions prevailing in the first centuries AD until ∼300 AD, from ∼800–1200 AD, and again in the twentieth century were interrupted by the LALIA and several cold events between ∼1300 and 1850 AD. Independent hydro climatic proxies from Europe and Asia describe dry conditions in the twelfth century, and from ∼1400–1700 AD…


Although associated with uncertainty, the LALIA—during which the fraction of pastoral and agricultural land use in central Europe and the Mediterranean seems exceptionally low, probably exceeded the rate of change and magnitude of any other AD cold phase.

The LALIA can therefore be considered as an additional environmental driver of crop failure, famine and plague, as well as a possible trigger for political, societal and economic turmoil. Outbreak of the Justinian plague between 541 and 543 AD across the Later Roman Empire, as well as its subsequent pandemic development, followed widespread food shortages right after the onset of the LALIA.


Spreading apparently from Asia, this persisting disease killed many millions of people and possibly contributed to the reduction of the eastern Roman Empire. At the same time, shorter growing seasons and subsequent nutritional deficiencies in people and livestock probably initiated large-scale pastoral movements towards China.

Although the political situation in Mongolia during the sixth century is not fully understood, it is presumed that conflicts among nomadic groups and regimes in northern China culminated in the replacement of the Rouran as the dominant steppe power by the Türks in 551 AD.


This suggests that there were major upheavals taking place in central Asia as early as the 550s, which gradually embroiled much of the central Eurasian steppe region, continuing into the 560s and 580s.



The Avars arrived north of the Black Sea ∼550 AD, entered into diplomatic relations but also military conflict with the Romans, and ultimately settled in modern Hungary. Renewed turmoil in central Asia reached the peripheral sedentary empires in the 620s.


The Türk ruler Illig Qaghan raided and invaded north China in the 620s, but after 626 experienced internal wars and Tang counterattacks, leading to the defeat and collapse of the eastern Türk Empire in 630 AD.


The western Türk’s, expanding across central Asia, apparently reached the frontiers of empires east of the Black Sea where, in 625, Emperor Heraclius established diplomatic contacts with Türk’s from the East. This alliance prompted the Türk’s attacks on Persia through the Caspian Gates that probably played an important role in Heraclius’s strategic victory over the Persians.


In a period partly overlapping with the LALIA, the Proto-Slavic dialects spread from a yet unknown homeland across most of continental Europe. Archaeological evidence of Slavic populations in the sixth and seventh centuries suggests that they originated in the greater Carpathian region, but the motivation for their expansion remains unclear.


Westward-moving steppe people such as the Avars, as well as opportunities for trading or developing unexploited border regions abandoned by the Roman administration, have been suggested as impetus for the movement of Slavic-speaking people.


The Avars’ arrival in Pannonia may also have reinforced the political opportunity seized by the departing Lombards who went on to invade Italy in 568 AD.


Insofar as cooling affected the Arabian Peninsula, the expected precipitation surplus together with reduced evapotranspiration during parts of the LALIA could have boosted scrub vegetation as fodder over arid areas, and thus indirectly contributed to the rise of the Islamic Empire.



Larger camel herds may have facilitated transportation of the Arab armies and their supplies during the substantial conquests in the seventh century, during which the reconstructed fraction of human land use seems relatively high in the Arabian Peninsula.


Although any hypothesis of a causal nexus between the volcanic-induced sixth-century unprecedented thermal shock and subsequent plague outbreaks, rising and falling empires, human migrations, and political upheaval requires caution, our newly obtained knowledge of the multidimensional impact of the LALIA fits in well with the main transformative events that occurred in Eurasia during that time.


In light of a still inadequate understanding of the various push–pull factors that may have been involved in long-distance population movements, and of the role they have played in human history, our ability to bring into historical analyses what we do know about past climatological and ecological consequences is particularly relevant.


To overcome reductionist approaches, the use of palaeoclimatic evidence in historical arguments has to be combined with multifactor analyses and nondeterministic explanations. Case-by-case assessment will further increase our perception of the environmental conditions under which historical events occurred.

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More recently it has been proposed that the Huns started moving West out of the Altai in the fourth century AD, not because of renewed military pressure from the east (for instance from the Rouran), but because of radical deterioration in the Altai region in that century…the drastic change in climate in the fourth century may have had an impact on the sudden thrust of the Huns remaining in the Altai region in a South-westerly direction into Central Asia.


As La Vaissiere shows in his excellent analysis of the Chinese sources on the Chinese sources on the early migration of the White Huns, the Huns from the Altai suddenly moved south in the 350’s AD.

The invasion of these Huns rapidly swallowed up what was left of the Kangju state, and put immense pressure on the eastern borders of the Sassanian and Kushan remnants in Southern Central Asia.

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Even so, it is permissible to infer that the Huns themselves were considerably more numerous than the presumed forebears who had turned westwards from the Tien Shan three centuries before.


For most of a largely balmy fourth century, they will have grazed extensive steppe lands cast of the Volga with rainfall averages then between 300 and 600 mm per year. One can imagine the numbers of animals and people rising steadily, only to stand the more exposed to a secular reversion to worse aridity and cold after 370, say.


No doubt too, Malthusian pressure would have been aggravated in this situation, as in so many similar, by ecological degradation caused by overgrazing against a background of droughtiness.


The natural impact reinforced the human and vice versa. Some consideration is given in Chapter 10, as to whether the sequence of Hunnish depredations in the late fourth century to early fifth lends itself to interpretation in terms of our modern knowledge of drought cycles in the South Russian/Ukrainian sectors.


But the sharp decline of the Huns in Europe after Atilla’s death, left other tribal groupings more freedom of action. Among them were the denizens of the Gothic heartland defined, from the first-century AD, by the wielbark culture in Pomerania and the Vistula basin.


In the interim, their population had continually risen as the low-intensity agriculture they practiced on land with poor natural drainage benefited from the generally diminished rainfall.


Come the fifth century, Gothic social and political organization was well developed. No doubt, too, the reversion to wetter conditions noted above will have precipitated an agrarian crisis in the old heartland just defined. Henceforth expansion from it, in more or less all directions.


A key to the balance of advantage on the Mongolian front will have been the perennial fluctuations of the gobi desert. Even a small encroachment of the sands could make the nomads desperate to attack, though a deeper one might have left them too weak to do so. The grassy plains of Manchuria were a wider nomad basin.

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DID A MEGADROUGHT FORCE THE HUNS TO INVADE EUROPE?

BY THE LATE-FOURTH CENTURY THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE EXPERIENCED AN INVASION BY NOMADIC PEOPLES FROM ASIA – THE HUNS. THIS INVASION WOULD INTENSIFY IN THE YEARS 447 TO 453 UNDER THE HUN LEADER ATTILA. THIS WOULD BE THE START OF SEVERAL INVASIONS INTO EUROPE FROM THE EAST DURING THE MIDDLE AGES, ENDING WITH THE MONGOL EMPIRE.





While the arrival of the Mongols in Eastern Europe is better known, historians have few clues to why the Huns and Avars migrated from Central Asia. A recent article by Edward R. Cook, a climate research specialist at Columbia University, offers some new insights.


In his article, ‘Megadroughts, ENSO, and the Invasion of Late-Roman Europe by the Huns and Avars’, Cook analyzes records related to the El-Nino Southern Oscillation – A PERIODIC EPISODE WHEN WARMER WATERS OFF THE WEST COAST OF SOUTH AMERICA CAUSE SIGNIFICANT CLIMATE CHANGE ACROSS THE PACIFIC REGION.


RESEARCHERS HAVE BEEN ABLE TO TRACK THE EFFECTS OF THE EL-NINO SOUTHERN OSCILLATION SYSTEM GOING BACK OVER TWO THOUSAND YEARS BY EXAMINING TREE RING PATTERNS FROM BOTH NEW MEXICO AND NEW ZEALAND.

Using data from these records and a couple of surviving ancient tree ring specimens from North-Central China, COOK SUGGESTS THAT THREE MEGA DROUGHTS STRUCK CENTRAL ASIA BETWEEN 360 AND 550, THE FIRST OF WHICH WAS THE WORST DROUGHT IN THE HISTORY OF THE REGION IN THE LAST 2000 YEARS.

COOK NOTES THAT THE EL-NINO SOUTHERN OSCILLATION CAUSES A WEATHER EFFECT KNOWN AS THE LA NIÑA, WHICH IN MODERN TIMES DISRUPTS RAINFALL IN CENTRAL ASIA DURING PERIOD OF MARCH TO JUNE. COOK WRITES, “ITS CONCEIVABLE THAT THIS PERIOD OF INTENSE ARIDITY SPURRED THE NOMADIC HUNS TO SEEK BETTER LIVING CONDITIONS WESTWARD OF THEIR HOME TERRITORY TO AS FAR AS THE EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE, WITH INVASION AND CONQUEST A NATURAL PART OF THIS MIGRATORY PROCESS.”


THE FIRST AND WORST MEGA DROUGHT TOOK PLACE AROUND 360 AD, FOLLOWED BY A SECOND DECLINE STARTING IN THE 430S, REACHING ITS DRIEST PERIOD AROUND 480.”INTERESTINGLY,” COOKS ADDS, “THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURY MEGA DROUGHTS ARE ALSO SEPARATED BY ABOUT 50 YEARS OF MOSTLY ABOVE AVERAGE WETNESS. THIS ‘PLUVIAL’ PERIOD IS LIKELY TO HAVE PRODUCED BETTER LIVING CONDITIONS FOR THE HUNS IN THEIR CENTRAL ASIAN HOMELANDS, THUS ALLOWING THEM TO BUILD UP THEIR CAPACITY FOR THE INVASION OF LATE-ROMAN EASTERN EUROPE.”

The article also NOTES THAT ANOTHER MEGA DROUGHTS OCCURRED AROUND 550 AD, WHEN ANOTHER NOMADIC GROUP KNOWN AS THE AVARS MADE THEIR WAY INTO EASTERN EUROPE. COOK EXPLAINS, “WHILE NOT AS EXTREME AS THE TWO PREVIOUS MEGA DROUGHTS, THIS PERIOD OF DRYNESS MAY AGAIN HAVE INCITED THE NOMADIC AVARS TO MIGRATE WESTWARD IN SEARCH OF BETTER CONDITIONS AND PLUNDERED WEALTH.”

The article ‘Megadroughts, ENSO, and the Invasion of Late-Roman Europe by the Huns and Avars’, appears in The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History, edited by W.V. Harris, and published by Brill. This collection of eleven essays that climate and environmental change in the Roman World and Early Middle Ages.

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Refugees from the Plains in Europe and China

It is so with the central parts of the world's continents, that they gradually become still more dry and desert-like.

Thousands of years ago, there were lakes and rivers on locations in the Sahara dessert, where no one can survive today. Rock Paintings show pictures of deer and humans. Each year, the desert is expanding to the south and north.

Central Asia was greener in the distant past, than it is today. Ruins of the lost cities in the current Chinese province of Xin Jiang can to day be found far out in the Taklamakan desert, where not a blade of green grass can be eyed for miles.

This climatic deterioration may have progressed mainly gradually, but also sometimes more dramatically.

Some years have brought drought disasters, which may have forced exposed people to leave their ancient land.

On the African continent the Bantus migrated from their original homeland, around roughly the northern Cameroon, as the desert expanded. They populated most of Africa.

On the Eurasian plains many of the Indo-European peoples chose to go for a future elsewhere on the continent, as the climate deteriorated. One by one they arrived in Europe or China.

About 100 AC a people landed on the shores of the eastern coast of the Danish island of Funen. They were beaten in battle, probably by the local Heruls, and their equipment and weapons were sacrificed to the victor's gods by being immersed in the holy lake, Vimose. It must have been such an Indo-European people from the heart of Eurasia, who had chosen to seek their fortune elsewhere.

Nobody knows the name of the defeated people; they may never have been registered in the history. After the defeat, the survivors possibly continued to Norway, here are made findings, which resemble those from Vimose.

Among their equipment was a small comb using a cross with antique hooks, a symbol of Central Asia, a very old symbol, possibly a symbol of the sun. The ancient swastika still has a Buddhist significance in Asia, it symbolizes the eternal alternation between death and reborn. The picture shows a similar comb from Nydam.

In the Taklamakan Desert of the modern Chinese province Xin Jiang swastika motifs also have been found, that are assumed to be of Indo-European origin.




Left: Comb from the Nydam Boat 200 - 400 AC with carved swastika.
Mid: The - Budha found in the Oseberg Ship in Norway 200 - 400 AC.
Right: Svastika motif found in the Taklamakan desert in Central Asia.

About 300 to 450 AC the climatic situation on Great Plains of Eurasia for one reason or another may had become particularly bad.

The plains must have become almost uninhabitable. Refugees streamed across the border into the North China and into the Roman Empire in Europe. A people named Sava in the present southern Afghanistan and Iran went to India.

HH Lamb writes in his "Climate History and the Modern World":
"Through the centuries, in Roman times from about 150 BC to 300 AC or a few decades later, camel caravans traveled along the great Silk Road through Asia to trade in luxury goods from China.


But from the fourth century AC, as we know from the changes in water levels in the Caspian Sea and studies of irregularities in rivers, lakes and abandoned cities in Sinkiang and Central Asia, drought developed to such an extent that it stopped the traffic on that route.


Other serious stages of this drought occurred between 300 AC and 800 AC, and especially around these dates as it can be seen from the old coastlines and ancient port structures near the big lakes, which indicates a very low water levels in the Caspian Sea around these times."(Page 159)


Just About 300 AC China had problems with refugees from the plains. "The five Hu" people from the north, Xiong Nu, Xianbei, Di, Qiang and Jie, sought refuge in the Middle Empire behind the Great Wall. The mandarins ordered them to return to their homelands, they answered back with force and created their own migration states.

This began the period in Chinese history known as "The Sixteen States". (About 300 AC to 400 AC)



Xiong Nu - the Huns - attack China.


In the same way as the migration peoples of Europe admired the Roman Empire and the Emperor, so admired the newly arrived peoples in China the Emperor and the Chinese culture.

They named their new states after famous dynasties from the past, the Kingdom of Han, the Kingdom of Qin, the Kingdom of Xia and so on. The newcomers quickly learned Chinese culture and language. Their noble and royal families married into Chinese families.

It is noted in the history that in the year of 317 AC millions of northern Chinese migrated to South China, allegedly because of the invasion from the plains.

A new Jin Dynasty was proclaimed in Nanjing. Entire clans of northern Chinese fled to the south, along with 60 to 70 percent of the nobility. Complete daoist monasteries moved to the south with all the monks and religious leaders.

In Europe the Ostro-Goths and the Visi-Goths left their old land on the Eurasian plains and aimed for a new land and a new life in Western Europe. The Vandals began the migration time by crossing the frozen river Rhine on New Year's Eve 406 AC.

Parts of the Xiong Nu people chose to find their way from Asia along the Silk Road to Europe. In Europe they were called by their real name, as they called themselves, "the Huns".


Also the Indo-Europeans peoples left their old land on the Eurasian plains and sought a new future in the west. They were among other names called "Alans" and "White Huns". Also some Indo-European peoples sought refuge and survival to the East, in China.

H. H. Lamb skriver i sin "Climate History and the Modern World", page 150:

"These extreme winters are usually, as the progress in the disastrous wet years in the 580's (AC) in Europe, considered as isolated events, so therefore there is not considered development any significantly colder climatic regime at any time during the millennium, we look at.


Recent studies in the Alps, especially by Ruthlisberger and Schneebeli from Geographical Institute at Zurich University and in Norway and northern Sweden by Vibjørn Karlen, suggest that this view needs revision.


Carbon 14 analysis of the end moraines of the ancient glaciers in the bottom of the valley of Val de Bagneres in southwestern Switzerland, reveal the locations that were reached by the glaciers, as they came down from the heights before and after 600-700 AC and perhaps again as late as 850 AC, as it is recorded as the well-known "Little Ice Age" period between 1550 and 1850 AC.



Density of growth rings in larch trees at Zermat in the Alps - from Climate History and the Modern World by H. H. Lamb.


These glaciers cut clearly an ancient Roman route across the mountains from Italy, which passes down through this valley. Further, studies of growth rings on larch trees that grew near the upper tree line near Zermatt indicate, what appears to be a gradual building up heat in the century of 300 (AC) followed by a fairly sharp variation between 400 and 415 AC and a significant cold period thereafter.


Therefore, if this dating is dependable, the Roman administration was facing further difficulties in addition to the growing threat from the barbaric migrations at the time, when the Western empire collapsed."

The very fact that the Vandals crossed the frozen Rhine in 406 AC, suggests that it has been a very cold period. I do not recall, that the Rhine has been frozen in recent years. Perhaps the problem on the Plains was as in Mongolia and Siberia in the winter of 2001, large amounts of snow, and freezing temperatures down to minus 40 or more. It was too cold for the cattle, which died in large numbers.


The Asian ancestors of the modern Danes were also such an Indo-European people among many, who in the beginning of the first millennium chose to seek new land in Europe.

Our ancient poem, "Ragnarok", says: "Tell about Ragnarok - about that great news are to bring up. The first is, that the Fimbul Winter is coming. Then the snow will be drifting from all sides. There will be a lot of frost and biting winds. The sun does not work. There will be three such winters after each other without summers in between." It sounds, as if our ancestors had experience of that such thing can happen.

The Indo-Europeans were not driven away from the Great Plains by new and tougher peoples. The Mongols, the Turks, the Kirgiz' and the Manchus first showed up from the big Sirbirian freezer more than hundred years after the beginning of the time of the big migrations. At that time the climate there again had eased, and the Eurasian plains were green, empty and inviting.

When the Turkish peoples took possession of the practically un inhabitated plains in the years of 500-600 AC, they were met with very little resistance, and therefore they could populate the plains in a very short span of years.

Ellsworth Huntington (1876 - 1947) was professor in geography in the American Yale University. He took part in several expedition to Central Asia and Palestine.

His main work is the book "The Pulse of Asia", where he wrote:

"The relapse of Europe in the Dark Ages - was apparently due to a rapid change of climate in Asia and probably all over the world, - a change which caused vast areas which were habitable at the time of Christ to become uninhabitable a few centuries later. The barbarian inhabitants were forced to migrate, and their migrations were the dominant factor in the history of the known world for centuries.

We in present time shall do well to ascertain whether we are facing the problems, which the Romans did. -

The data, which I obtained in Central Asia - confirm the surmise of the historians. There is a strong reason to believe that during the last two thousand years there has been a widespread and pronounced tendency toward aridity.



Result of ice-core drilling from the Greenland ice cap - Camp Century.


In dryer regions the extent of land available for pasturage and cultivation has been seriously curtailed; and the habitability of the country has decreased. - After a period of rapidly decreasing rainfall and rising temperature during the early centuries of the Christian era, there is evidence of a slight reversal, and of a tendency toward more abundant rainfall and lower temperature during the Middle Ages.

In relatively dry regions increasing aridity is a dire calamity, giving rise to famine and distress. These in turn are causes of wars and migrations, which engender the fall of dynasties and empires, the rise of new nations, and the growth of new civilizations."

Ellsworth Huntington measured growth-rings on the big old trees in the U.S. national parks to find evidence for his theory of cyclical climate changes as key drivers of history.



Graph showing temperature in the Sargasso Sea as function of time.


Unfortunately, his results were not convincing related to the Migration Age and the Germanic peoples invasion of the Roman Empire around 400 AC.

However Greenland ice-core drillings seem to show a temperature minimum in the fifth century.

Also the temperature in the Sargasso Sea was very low in the years 400 to 500 AC.

A group of scientists has concluded that the surface temperature of the Farewell Lake, in Alaska during the Roman Warm Period (0-300 AC) was as high as today, but that it nevertheless fell steadily by a total of 3.5 degrees and reached a minimum in 600 AC.


Geologists from the University of Wisconsin have analyzed a stalactite from the Soreq Cave near Jerusalem and concluded that the climate was drier in the Eastern Mediterranean area between 100 AC and 700 AC, with marked decreases in rainfall around 100 AC and 400 AC.

But whatever the scientific climate data for the time of the migrations, then it cannot be that whole peoples break up with wives, children, domestic animals and all their belongings from their ancient land, without having very compelling reasons to do so.

Logically, it must have been a matter of life or death, otherwise sane people do not do such thing.

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Originally posted by kikuyu22:
Mike111,I'm quite interested in his hypotheses;I'm sure I SPEAK FOR OTHERS.Pls allow him to post. I found his European nuclear albinization plan for refugees realllllly out there but imo he's onto smth.

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THE WORLD WAS ENTERING A PERIOD OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE. In Europe, this was evidenced by rising sea levels and the emergence of malaria in the North Sea region, while in Asia from the start of the fourth century SHARPLY REDUCED SALINITY IN THE ARAL SEA, MARKEDLY DIFFERENT VEGETATION ON THE STEPPES (EVIDENT FROM HIGH-RESOLUTION POLLEN ANALYSES) AND NEW PATTERNS OF GLACIER ADVANCES IN THE TIAN SHAN RANGE ALL SHOW FUNDAMENTAL SHIFTS IN GLOBAL CLIMATIC CHANGE.


THE RESULTS WERE DEVASTATING, ATTESTED BY A REMARKABLE LETTER WRITTEN BY A SOGDIAN TRADER IN THE EARLY FOURTH CENTURY AND NOT FOUND FAR FROM DUNHUANG IN WESTERN CHINA. THE MERCHANT RECOUNTED TO HIS FELLOW TRADERS THAT FOOD SHORTAGES AND FAMINE HAD TAKEN A HEAVY TOLL THAT SUCH CATASTROPHE HAD BEFALLEN CHINA AS TO BE BARELY DESCRIBABLE. The emperor had fled from the capital, setting fire to his palace as he left, while the Sogdian merchant communities were gone, WIPED BY STARVATION AND DEATH. DO NOT BOTHER TRYING TO TRADE THERE, THE AUTHOR ADVISED, “THERE IS NO PROFIT FROM YOU TO GAIN FROM IT”….THE SITUATION WAS APOCALYPTIC.


The CHAOS CREATED THE PERFECT CONDITIONS FOR THE MOSAIC OF STEPPE TRIBES TO CONSOLIDATE. THESE PEOPLE INHABITED THE BELTS OF LAND LINKING MONGOLIA WITH THE PLAINS OF CENTRAL EUROPE, WHERE CONTROL OF THE BEST GRAZING LAND AND OF RELIABLE WATER SUPPLY GUARANTEED CONSIDERABLE POLITICAL POWER. ONE TRIBE NOW ESTABLISHED THEMSELVES AS MASTERS OF THE STEPPES, CRUSHING ALL BEFORE THEM. The Sogdian trader referred to the architects of his APOCALYPSE IN HIS LETTER AS THE XWN. THEY WERE THE XIONGNU- BETTER KNOWN IN THE WEST AS THE HUNS.


BETWEEN 350 AND 360 THERE WAS A HUGE WAVE OF MIGRATION AS TRIBES WERE SHUNTED OFF THEIR LANDS AND DRIVEN WESTWARDS. THIS WAS MOST LIKELY CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE, WHICH MADE LIFE ON THE STEPPE EXCEPTION-ALLY HARSH AND TRIGGERED INTENSE COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES. THE IMPACT WAS FELT FROM BACTRIA IN NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN RIGHT UP TO THE ROMAN FRONTIER ON THE DANUBE, where refugees began to appear in large numbers, begging to be allowed to resettle on imperial territory after being driven off their lands north of the Black Sea by the advancing Huns.


¬THE SITUATION QUICKLY BECAME DANGEROUSLY UNSTABLE. A massive Roman army send to restore order was heavily defeated on the flat plains of Thrace in 378, with the Emperor Valens among the many casualties. THE DEFENSES BURST OPEN, AND TRIBE AFTER TRIBE POURED THROUGH INTO THE EMPIRE’S WESTERN PROVINCES, THREATENING ROME AS A RESULT. PREVIOUSLY, THE NORTHERN LIP OF THE BLACK SEA AND THE STEPPE LANDS STRETCHING DEEP INTO ASIA HAD BEEN REGARDED AS IMPLACABLY BARBAROUS, FILLED WITH FIERCE WARRIORS AND EMPTY OF CIVILIZATION OR RESOURCES. IT HAD NOT CROSSED ROME’S MIND THAT THESE REGIONS COULD ACTS AS ARTERIES, JUST LIKE THE ROUTES LINKING THE WEST WITH THE EAST THROUGH PERSIA AND THROUGH EGYPT. THESE VERY REGIONS WERE ABOUT TO DELIVER DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, INTO THE VERY HEART OF EUROPE.

DISPLACEMENT ACROSS THE STEPPES NORTH OF THE BLACK SEA, HAD CREATED A PERFECT STORM THAT LED TO THE EMPIRE’S FRONTIERS, ON THE RHINE BEING OVERWHELMED…BURNING OR NOT, ROME’S EMPIRE IN THE WEST NOW FELL APART. SOON SPAIN WAS BEING RAVAGED, ATTACKED BY TRIBES SUCH AS THE ALANS, WHOSE HOMELANDS LAY FAR AWAY BETWEEN THE CASPIAN AND BLACK SEAS, AND WHO’S TRADE IN SABLE SKINS HAD BEEN CAREFULLY CHARTED BY COMMENTATORS WRITING IN CHINA, TWO CENTURIES EARLIER. Another TRIBAL GROUPING, THE VANDALS, WHO HAD BEEN DISPLACED BY THE HUNS, REACHED ROMAN NORTH AFRICA BY THE 420’, TAKING CONTROL OF PRINCIPAL CITY, CARTHAGE, AS WELL AS THE VIBRANT AND LUCRATIVE SURROUNDING PROVINCES THAT SUPPLIED MOST OF THE WESTERN HALF OF THE EMPIRE….

AS IF THIS WERE NOT BAD ENOUGH. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, HAVING FLUSHED FORWARD A HOTCH-POTCH OF TRIBES- TEREVINGIAN GOTHS, ALANS, VANDALS, SUEVI, GEPIDS, NEURIANS, BASTARNIANS, AND OTHERS- BESIDES THE HUNS THEMSELVES APPEARED IN EUROPE, LED BY THE MOST FAMOUS FIGURE OF LATE ANTIQUITY: ATILLA….


THE HUNS CAUSED PURE TERROR…THEY HAD NO INTEREST IN AGRICULTURE, NOTED ANOTHER, AND ONLY WANTED TO STEAL FROM THEIR NEIGHBORS, ENSLAVING THEM IN THE PROCESS: THEY WERE LIKE WOLVES.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE HUNS SPELT SERIOUS DANGER FOR THE EASTERN HALF OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, WHICH HAD THUS FAR HAS BEEN RELATIVELY UNSCATHED BY THE UPHEAVALS THAT DEVASTATED MUCH OF EUROPE. The provinces of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were still intact, as was the magnificent city of Constantinople.

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They also found in a number of locations, most clearly in the northern Levant, that late Roman times saw a massive volume of soil erosion. In the Levant, this soil loss permanently ruined regions that had supported agriculture for millennia. Clearly Roman pressures of populations and empire put significant stress on Mediterranean landscapes, beyond the signals of human presence and alteration that since the Late Neolithic appear in many Old World ecological studies. But this impact was not, apparently continuous, but sudden, late in the Roman period.


The author of the best study of this late Roman erosion sees a “high likelihood” that climate-the specifically-a shift toward intense seasonal rains at the transition to the Dark Ages played a role in this degradation. There is now reasonably definitive evidence for this “likelihood”: new studies show conclusively that following the onset of North Atlantic ice rafting around AD 350, the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted from a more positive to a more negative mode, pushing the winter westerlies south into the Mediterranean, bringing a surge of winter and spring precipitation, after hundreds of years of moderately dry climate. Flooding recorded in the sediments along the Arno Riber-including entire ships buried in flood deposits- suggests that episodes of extreme rain might have begun around 300 BC in central Italy. Fredric Cheyette sees these advancing rains as fundamentally undermining the grain-based economy of Italy and Southern France.


In South central Anatolia, a century-long drought broke sharply around AD 540, followed by several hundred years of humidity, suggesting enhanced rainfall. In Northern Europe, precipitation dropped significantly between AD 200 and AD 350, recovered, and then fell again to the millennial lows around AD 450, as the NAO negative mode set in for the Dark Ages. Thus these paleoecological studies strongly suggest the massive soil degradation associated with the Roman empire was driven by population pressure and climatic contingency,

A Central structural dynamic in the decline of Rome, particularly its western domain, has to lie in a spiraling population decline, which undermined military recruitment, economic demand, and even political skill. The most obvious explanation for this relentless but mosaic pattern of demographic decline lies in the series of epidemics that swept along Mediterranean trade routes and lines of March starting in the late second century. William McNeill, in his classic Plagues and People, explains the epidemics of late antiquity in terms of the confluence of civilizational disease pools, and suggests that growing population and growing trade along the Old World core running from China through India to the Mediterranean was a powerful conduit for new diseases. The fact that epidemics struck China soon after they hit the Mediterranean suggests the possibility that India may have been the source of the plague probably lay in the tangle of Central Asian routes: one team of geneticists argues that its ultimate genetic root lies in the Tibetan plateau.

While epidemic disease was a constant in the Roman world, three epidemics stand out as particularly intense, with impacts perhaps rivaling that of the Black Death of the 1350’s. The first of these, the Antonine Plague, carried back to Rome by legions returned from Babylon and an assault on the Parthian empire, struck a reasonably stable empire in Ad 165. Generally thought to have been small box, the Antoine Plague lasted for fifteen years, and ended after it may have killed Marcus Aurelius, the last of a line of five so called Good Emperors who had ruled since AD 96.


Epidemics then struck various parts of the empire every twenty-five to thirty years; in Nubia in 200; in the armies of the Euphrates in the 232; and then another fifteen-year-long epidemics, Cyprian’s Plague, perhaps smallpox, perhaps measles, apparently emerged from Ethiopia in AD 251. Localized epidemics are recorded over the fourth and fifth centuries, often associated with warfare, but in AD 542 a deadly epidemic known as Justinian’s Plague spread north from Egypt; now genetically identified as bubonic plague, this epidemic flared, ebbed, and flared again for centuries, before it finally faded in the 800’s.


From the beginning of the third century, Rome was wracked by challenges from beyond its borders, and wars constantly fed on both famines and epidemics. The Antonine Plague of 165-80 was introduced by warfare in the east, and Cyprian’s Plague of 251-66 was embedded in a long series of wars to defend the frontiers running from 234-84, at the end of which the empire was effectively divided in half. Epidemics accompanied wars in 310-13, 359-63, 378-9, 406-10, and from the 440’s to the 470’s.


The Justinian Plague arrived to Italy in 542, during the Gothic-Byzantine Wars; the combinations of war, famine, and epidemics brought utter and final devastation to the ancient center of empire. As local trade collapsed, rural Italians abandoned the lowlands and huddled in rough new mountain villages, as they had in the last crisis, at the close of the Bronze Age. Thus a dynamic of first war and epidemic, and then a triad of climate, war, and epidemic, has to lie at the center of an explanation of the long decline and final collapse of the empire.


In 378, two years before the establishment of Christianity, a barbarian horde destroyed the Roman army at the battle of Adrianople; by 410 these Visigoths had sacked Rome and moved on to Gaul in search of land. By this point CLIMATE CHANGE seems to have once again entered the picture. The Goths were one of a variety of groups pressing in upon the Roman frontiers, attracted by an increasingly poorly defender frontier, but also entering into complex trade relations across this boundary. Increasingly they were harried by a new group from the steppe, by a new group, the Huns, who had emerged recently from the Central Asian steppes.


If the empire itself was not affected initially by climate change, tree ring evidence from the edge of the steppes, suggests that after AD 200, and more decisively after AD 350- an increasing frequency of drought put Germans, Goths, and Huns on the move and into Europe. Climate change may have contributed to agrarian disruption on and beyond the frontiers: pressed by the Huns, the Visigoths were in a desperate search for food and supply, when they demanded entry into the empire, leading to the battle of Adrianople. Such droughts seem to have been a manifestation of the onset of the cooler climate across the Northern Hemisphere, marked by ice rafting off Greenland, though not by any serious advance of the Siberian High.


If conditions certainly did not reach the scale of the final Bronze Age crisis or the Little Ice age that would arrive a millennium later, it is clear that the Classical optimum was over, and for the duration of the ice rafting episode, roughly running from AD 375 to AD 800, climate conditions in northwest Eurasia were colder and more variable than during the Classical Optimum on the ensuring medieval Optimum, so called. Very roughly, these were the textbook dark ages.

A fascinating argument links an episode of catastrophic climate change and the onset of the Justinian’s plague and indeed the end of the classical age around the old world. The IPCC study of northern hemispheric temperature based on tree rings indicate a short but vicious spike of cold temperatures around AD 540…David Keys has compiled the evidence to support the argument that a massive volcanic eruption in AD 536, blanketing the earth in a Sulphur haze. Keys placed this eruption in Indonesia or Papua New Guinea, but recent work suggests that the location was the volcano Ilopango in El Salvador. Cutting solar input for as much as a decade, this volcanic haze was recorded in texts from Britain to Korea, describing dark days, a dim sun, and mid-summer frosts; in South China it rained yellow dust that could be “scooped up in handfuls”.


Keys argues that this brief disruption had a series of profound effects. Droughts across the Asian grasslands sent a final wave of nomads against the frontiers of the Eastern [Roman] empire, further eroding a Roman legacy finally lost when the Turks- set in motion in the 540’s by droughts in Mongolia- destroyed the last vestiges of Byzantium in the mid-fifteenth century.

In Yemen, Keys argues, that massive floods following the 536 event from the 540’s to the 590’s destroyed the massive Marib Dam- which had destroyed the population and political power of Yemen, allowing the balance in Arabia to shift to Medina. Hence the prophet Muhammed emerged to found Islam, a world religion that –with Christanity- would redefine the cultural geography of the shattered pieces of the Ancient Mediterranean and south-west empires.


The plague itself was a product of the 536 event, Keys also argues. He proposes that the rains that followed a decade of post-eruption drought set off a burst of reproduction among mice in East Africa, mice carrying fleas that are hosts to the Bubonic plague. He argues that with the explosion of the mouse population, fleas carrying the plague bacillus were transferred to the black rats living in the shipping involved in transporting elephant ivory north through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. This sequence, he suggests, was the origin of the Justinian plague that hit the Mediterranean in 542 and then flared for centuries.


The Dark ages, AD 400-900


Very broadly and diffusely, the end of a global classical antiquity was shaped in some measure by a Climatic global dark age, running from roughly AD 400 to AD 900. This reversal was coherent in many parts of the world, but it did not have the reach and consequence of the two Hallstatt minimum/Siberian high epochs that bracketed both classical antiquity and the middle ages. Rather than a strong Siberian High at work, these climatic dark ages were marked in a cold northern hemisphere by a round of North Atlantic ice rafting, and by ENSO variation in the Pacific tilting toward the El Nino mode, with erratic floods and droughts along the Andean coast.


Leaving the causal forces to the climate scientists, we can map the impacts of climate stress in the post-Ancient Dark ages, between AD 400 and AD 900. Population stagnated in Europe and China, which barely managed by AD 1000 to restore the population levels of AD 200, 800 years earlier. Similar forces may have shaped the rough contours of Indian history…Measures of the South Asian monsoon, suggest increasingly drier conditions during the dark ages, consonant with a colder north, a cooler West pacific warm pool, and the El Nino ENSO mode.


The classical Gupta empire emerged in the Ganges valley around 315, was at its peak between 375 and 415, and completely gone by 550. The Gupta seemed to have emerged after harsh droughts at the turn of the fourth century and collapsed after similar droughts at the end of the fifth century. The arrival of a branch of the Huns from Central Asia at around 500 contributed to the final collapse of the Gupta Empire into warring kingdoms. Islamic Arabs began to conquer the Western approaches to the subcontinent in the eight century, when two estimates show South Asia in the midst of a long advance toward drought conditions running from roughly AD 600 to AD 900.


The first several centuries of the Dark Age climate pattern were the background context for the rise and spread of Islam in Arabia and across the arid zone from India to Spain. It seems likely that the catastrophe flooding of the early Dark ages, with the ongoing impacts of the Justinian plague, shaped the march of early Islam.


On the Positive side, however the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia continued to have relatively high precipitation throughout the negative NAO Dark ages. Such might well have provided the material, underpinnings of the strength of the Islamic Golden Age, and an agriculture that supported the rise of cities across the Arab-Islamic domain.


Here opinion is divided, with one camp describing an Islamic Green Revolution of new species and new agricultural techniques, while another sees more continuities with classical times and only minimal population growth across the Islamic world; but it may well turn out that Islamic achievements were based in some small measure in the stronger southerly flow of the Atlantic winter westerlies.


All of the various estimates for ENSO on the Andean coasts suggest a sequence of wild extremes of precipitation between AD 400 and AD 1000…The onset of the Dark Age ENSO climatic whiplash conditions shaped the collapse of two Early Intermediate Peruvian cultures, the Moche and the Nasca, which emerged around 200 BC and collapsed in a burst of mega-El Nino flooding and a severe drought in the late 500’s AD; at roughly the same time the great city-state of Teotihuacan collapsed, as droughts hit the Mexican highlands.


The final transformation of the Maya around AD 900 was one symptom of a wider global climatic event that intensified the closing century of the Dark Age climatic system. A minor solar minimum and coincident volcanic eruptions seem to have driven a simultaneous drop in northern hemisphere temperatures, the advance of the Chinese cold winter monsoon, and the retreat of the Asian summer monsoon. In particular the fate of societies in the Americas and in China are curiously linked, and suggests a Pacific influence was at work.


These events unfolded exactly at the same time as the Mayan crisis and broadly with the collapse of Andean Middle Horizon cultures, and comprised some of the final acts of the global Dark ages. There are thus remarkable parallels in the fate of societies around the cricum-Pacific during this millennium, shaped, it would appear, by a trans-Pacific pattern of climatic change linked along the ITCZ, and by its southward shift during the 800’s and 900’s. Intense drought in the Yucatan and El Nino flooding followed by drought along the Andean coast matched intense winter cold in North-East Asia.


On both sides of the ocean, long established societies collapsed as productive systems failed, people starved, and rebellions and wars destroyed ancient patterns of authority. And these late Dark Age Pacific events had their Atlantic analogs as well, during several centuries of recorded severe winters between 750 and 950, across Europe to the Black sea, which match up with indications of volcanic eruptions in the Greenland ice records. Broadly coinciding with the Carolingian empires launched by Charlemagne, this sequence of cold winter climates stressed, if it did not impede, the rise of Western Europe at the close of the first millennium.

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The Hephtalites in Persia

After occupying Bactria, the strong White Hun army made its way toward Persia. The fact that a so-called nomadic nation, like the Hephtalites and their predecessors, the Kushans, wanted to conquer the settled, wealthy peoples of ancient culture was understandable from their point of view. The nomadic nations were stock-breeders and agricultural peoples in the Bronze Age, according to the archeological finds.


However, because of the climatic change in Central Asia, their cultivated fields became steppes or even uncultivable deserts. At that time, they adopted the nomadic, pastoral way of life "with their high degree of adaptation to the environmental possibilities".[9] These harsh circumstances made them strong, brave warriors. Since they possessed only the products derived from stock-breeding, and the exchange of these products did not cover their needs, sometime they had to plunder the richer settled countries surrounding Central Asia. For them, war was almost a profession of livelihood. Initially, they obtained their booty or tribute from China but the Chinese began to build walls as a protection against them.


After that, the nomads wandered toward the west; one group of them occupied the Transcaucasian territories, while others migrated to the south into the small oasis-states of Fergana and Sogdiana and later to Bactria and Gandhara; finally the "fabulous India" became the target of their conquests. They were slowly assimilated into the peoples of the occupied lands; the majority of the tribes even settled there because they did not want to go back to the severe climate of the steppes or the deserts.

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Page 158


Warfare was not the only cataclysm that befall the provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 540’s. For reasons that are not entirely clear (although a major volcanic explosion in East Asia perhaps provides the most plausible explanation), the 530’s represented a period of extreme and violent climatic instability in much of the known world. The impact of climate change on the delicate grassland ecology of the Eurasian steppe may well explain the dynamic shift in political fortunes there that was to result in the expansion of the Turks towards Persia and the West. Nomadic armies, after all relied on their horses and horses depended on pasture.


Pg170

As already seen, the military security of both the Eastern Roman and Sasanian Empires was critically sensitive to military and political developments on the grasslands of the West Eurasian steppe. Political and military conditions on the steppe were themselves highly sensitive to climate change.

Any abnormal variation in temperature risked having a dramatic impact on the availability and quality of grassland on which the nomad powers and tribal confederations of the region depended for their military might; for these were, as we have seen, cavalry empires, their warriors famed for their swiftness on horseback and dexterity with bow, reliant on a ready supply of well-fed mounts.

A late sixth-century Byzantine military handbook (the so called Strategikon of Maurice) noted of such Scythians…and “others whose way of life resembles that of the Hunnic peoples”, that that “they are hurt by a shortage of fodder which can result from the huge numbers of horses they bring with them. “


“Also in event of battle, when opposed by an infantry force in close formation, they stay on their horses and do not dismount, for they do not last long fighting on foot.” The 530’s, as seen in the previous chapter, was a period of climactic instability, and was recorded as such by chroniclers, historians, and witnesses from as far afield as Ireland, Gaul, China, and Japan.

This in turn opened the way to a major reconfiguration of power relations on the steppe, resulting in a renewed period of political and military insecurity for both Persia, and ultimately, Byzantium, associated with the demise of the Hephthalites and the arrival on Persia’s frontiers of the Turk Khaganate.

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Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought - with measurements dating back to 138BC
Tree-rings prove climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now - and world has been cooling for 2,000 years
Study of semi-fossilised trees gives accurate climate reading back to 138BC
World was warmer in Roman and Medieval times than it is now
How did the Romans grow grapes in northern England? Perhaps because it was warmer than we thought.

A study suggests the Britain of 2,000 years ago experienced a lengthy period of hotter summers than today.

German researchers used data from tree rings – a key indicator of past climate – to claim the world has been on a ‘long-term cooling trend’ for two millennia until the global warming of the twentieth century.

This cooling was punctuated by a couple of warm spells.

These are the Medieval Warm Period, which is well known, but also a period during the toga-wearing Roman times when temperatures were apparently 1 deg C warmer than now.

They say the very warm period during the years 21 to 50AD has been underestimated by climate scientists.

Lead author Professor Dr Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz said: ‘We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.

‘This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant, however it is not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1 deg C.’

In general the scientists found a slow cooling of 0.6C over 2,000 years, which they attributed to changes in the Earth’s orbit which took it further away from the Sun.

The study is published in Nature Climate Change.

It is based on measurements stretching back to 138BC.

The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming

Professor Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC.

In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling.
Professor Esper said: 'Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.’

The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles.

In the cold environment of Finnish Lapland, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.
”Global cooling: It is the first time that researchers have been able to accurately measure trends in global temperature over the last two millennia”

”The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were”
The density measurements correlate closely with the summer temperatures in this area on the edge of the Nordic taiga; the researchers were thus able to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality.

The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.

In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form.

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So here once again we have, A DIRECT ADMISSION, THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS WHAT CAUSED the MIGRATION PERIOD OF WHITE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES THROUGHOUT EUROPE AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND MANY EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS AND CAUSED ALL SORTS OF CONFLICTS AND WARS, AND POWER SHIFTS AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES!

Please take everything that I’ve said above and in my sources seriously, ES, and consider what the information here being presented means and what the LARGE HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS OF IT ARE! Because it’s clear to me that CLIMATIC SHIFTING AND COOLING EVENTS, LIKE THE LITTLE ICE AGE, AND PLAGUE OUTBREAKS AS AN INDIRECT RESULT OF IT; is what CAUSED THE DOWNFALL AND COLLAPSE OF BLACK EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS AND SOCIETIES IN EUROPE!

Just like how global climate shifts and changing events, IS WHAT CAUSED THE COLLAPSES AND DESTRUCTIONS AND EVENTUALL FALLINGS, of civilizations across the entire globe, from the Mayan, to the Persian, to the Chinese, to the Indians etc etc etc.

And all the proofs and sources TO PROVE AND CONFIRM THAT OUTRIGHT, ARE CONTAINED IN THIS POST, AND IN MY OTHER POSTS AND SOURCES THAT I HAVE PROVIDED IN THIS VERY THREAD!
 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 
The Little Ice Age is a period between about 1300 and 1870

So where's the historical documentation of a huge migration of Central Asians into Europe at this time between about 1300 and 1870??

And if Europe was densely populated with blacks why would they allow a migration to displace them? Didn't Europe have a much more advanced military than Central Asians?

In 1300 your ancestors lived in Africa. So why does any of this matter?
 

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Posted by Ish Gebor (Member # 18264) on :
 
When Climate Change Sparked Wars: The Little Ice Age | Video
By Steve Spaleta | April 1, 2016 10:22am ET


A period of 'global cooling’ of just .6°C during the years 1500 to 1850 caused droughts that led to wars in Europe. Climate historian Dagomar Degroot studies that period, explains how climate change led to a call to arms.


http://www.livescience.com/54260-when-climate-change-sparked-wars-the-little-ice-age-video.html
 

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Posted by Mindovermatter (Member # 22317) on :
 
^^^^With mainstream news outlets coming and admitting what I have pretty much said in this thread, why is what I am writing in this thread so hard for veteran members here to believe?


Now take a look at this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/plague-pit-black-death-skeletons-lincolnshire-children-thornton-abbey-a7446556.html

quote:

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Plague pit with skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, found at abbey in Lincolnshire


Mass burial pits remain unusual from disease that killed around half of Britain's population




A plague pit containing the skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, has been discovered at the site of a 14th century monastery hospital.

The macabre find in Thornton Abbey, near Immingham in North Lincolnshire, was discovered by a team from Sheffield University.


The presence of such a large burial site - which included both male and female adults as well as the children - suggests the community was overwhelmed by Black Death and left unable to cope with the number of people who died, they said.

The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.


The disease is documented to have reached Lincolnshire in the spring of 1349.

The team said they sent teeth samples from the skeletons found at the Thornton Abbey site to McMaster University in Canada, where ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the tooth pulp. DNA test revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague.

Dr Hugh Willmott, Sheffield University's Department of Archaeology, said: "Despite the fact it is now estimated that up to half the population of England perished during the Black Death, multiple graves associated with the event are extremely rare in this country, and it seems local communities continued to dispose of their loved ones in as ordinary a way as possible."


Dr Willmott said the only two previously identified 14th-century sites where Yersinia pestis has been identified are historically documented cemeteries in London, where the civic authorities were forced to open new emergency burial grounds to cope with the very large numbers of the urban dead.

He said: "The finding of a previously unknown and completely unexpected mass burial dating to this period in a quiet corner of rural Lincolnshire is thus far unique, and sheds light into the real difficulties faced by a small community ill-prepared to face such a devastating threat."

The archaeologist, who has been working at the site since 2011, said items found at the abbey have also shed light on the lives of those who lived there.

He said one artefact found in the excavated hospital building was a small Tau Cross pendant, which some people thought was a cure for St Anthony's fire, a term used to describe a variety of skin conditions.

He said: "While skeletons are interesting, they just represent the end of somebody's life and actually what we are interested in as archaeologists is the life they led before they died.

"One of the ways we can connect with that is through the everyday objects they left behind."


"Before we began the dig, the site was just an ordinary green field grazed by sheep for hundreds of years, but like many fields across England, as soon as you take away the turf, layers of history can be revealed by archaeology."


Dr Diana Mahoney Swales, of the University of Sheffield's Department for Lifelong Learning, who is leading the study of the bodies, said: "Once the skeletons return to the lab, we start properly learning who these people really are.

"We do this by identifying whether they are male or female, children or adults. And then we start to investigate the diseases that they may have lived through, such as metabolic diseases like rickets and scurvy, which are degenerative diseases for the skeleton.

"However, for diseases such as plague, which are lethal, we have to use ancient DNA analysis to investigate that further."

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
^^^^With mainstream news outlets coming and admitting what I have pretty much said in this thread, why is what I am writing in this thread so hard for veteran members here to believe?


Now take a look at this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/plague-pit-black-death-skeletons-lincolnshire-children-thornton-abbey-a7446556.html

quote:

---

Plague pit with skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, found at abbey in Lincolnshire


Mass burial pits remain unusual from disease that killed around half of Britain's population




A plague pit containing the skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, has been discovered at the site of a 14th century monastery hospital.

The macabre find in Thornton Abbey, near Immingham in North Lincolnshire, was discovered by a team from Sheffield University.


The presence of such a large burial site - which included both male and female adults as well as the children - suggests the community was overwhelmed by Black Death and left unable to cope with the number of people who died, they said.

The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.


The disease is documented to have reached Lincolnshire in the spring of 1349.

The team said they sent teeth samples from the skeletons found at the Thornton Abbey site to McMaster University in Canada, where ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the tooth pulp. DNA test revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague.

Dr Hugh Willmott, Sheffield University's Department of Archaeology, said: "Despite the fact it is now estimated that up to half the population of England perished during the Black Death, multiple graves associated with the event are extremely rare in this country, and it seems local communities continued to dispose of their loved ones in as ordinary a way as possible."


Dr Willmott said the only two previously identified 14th-century sites where Yersinia pestis has been identified are historically documented cemeteries in London, where the civic authorities were forced to open new emergency burial grounds to cope with the very large numbers of the urban dead.

He said: "The finding of a previously unknown and completely unexpected mass burial dating to this period in a quiet corner of rural Lincolnshire is thus far unique, and sheds light into the real difficulties faced by a small community ill-prepared to face such a devastating threat."

The archaeologist, who has been working at the site since 2011, said items found at the abbey have also shed light on the lives of those who lived there.

He said one artefact found in the excavated hospital building was a small Tau Cross pendant, which some people thought was a cure for St Anthony's fire, a term used to describe a variety of skin conditions.

He said: "While skeletons are interesting, they just represent the end of somebody's life and actually what we are interested in as archaeologists is the life they led before they died.

"One of the ways we can connect with that is through the everyday objects they left behind."


"Before we began the dig, the site was just an ordinary green field grazed by sheep for hundreds of years, but like many fields across England, as soon as you take away the turf, layers of history can be revealed by archaeology."


Dr Diana Mahoney Swales, of the University of Sheffield's Department for Lifelong Learning, who is leading the study of the bodies, said: "Once the skeletons return to the lab, we start properly learning who these people really are.

"We do this by identifying whether they are male or female, children or adults. And then we start to investigate the diseases that they may have lived through, such as metabolic diseases like rickets and scurvy, which are degenerative diseases for the skeleton.

"However, for diseases such as plague, which are lethal, we have to use ancient DNA analysis to investigate that further."

---

So here we have a plague that killed off HALF OF BRITAIN'S ENTIRE POPULATION DURING THE TIME PERIOD! YES HALF OF IT, WITH APPROXIMATELY 200 MILLION, WHICH IS A HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE FOR THE TIME PERIOD (EARLY 1300's)!


So why it so hard for members here to believe, that since there was a significant indigenous EUROPEAN Black/brown population IN EUROPE ALL THE WAY UP TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S TIME PERIOD (which was the 1700's) FROM THE NEOLITHIC, that plagues and pandemic outbreaks like the Black death killed off and destroyed many of the population centers in Britain at the time, holding the high density pops of Black British at the time period?


I mean you heard what the article said, the Black death killed off HALF OF BRITAIN'S ENTIRE POPULATION AT THE TIME! So if Britain had a significant native black British population in Britain at the time, why wouldn't the Black death have killed off and lowered the population numbers off, a vast portion of Black British, when the black death hit the British Isles or even the entirety of Europe for that matter?


And not only did plagues like the Black death hit the main cities and towns of Britain at the time, but also rural village areas, as this burial shows!


Think about what I've just said there everyone, and I would appreciate if members like Fencer and Mike chimed in!

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

since there was a significant indigenous EUROPEAN Black/brown population IN EUROPE ALL THE WAY UP TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S TIME PERIOD

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
https://www.occupycorporatism.com/scientists-claim-blue-eyes-originated-from-7000-year-old-male/

White Europeans claim their "blue eyed" ancestor's also came into form 8,000 years ago right exactly when the Vela supernova event hit our solar system and smothered our planet's surface with high degrees of cosmic radiation projectile bombardment and large amounts of solar flares.

SO THERE YOU GO! White Eurasians and White Europeans are the result of the Vela supernova event showering earth with high degrees of cosmic radiation and causing massive amounts of mutations en masse at the same time.

And in this case, these mutations resulted in blue/light eyes, and light hair and skin as found in modern White Europeans and White Eurasian groups TODAY!

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mike111:
Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mike111:
The African had of course been in Germany for more than 40,000 years, but the oldest Black skeletons found so far, are only from 2,600 B.C.

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Indus era at least 8,000 years old; ended because of weaker monsoon

Experts have found evidence of the Indus Valley Civilization being at least 8,000 years old and not 5,500 years old.



[b]Due to a recent revelation made by scientists from IIT-Kharagpur and Archaeological Survey of India, time has arrived to rewrite history textbooks.


A group of researchers in India have used carbon dating techniques on animal remains and pottery fragments to conclude that the Indus Valley settlements could be 8,000 years old—2,500 years older than previously believed. That could make the Indus Valley settlements, which were spread across Pakistan and northern India, even older than the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations.

What’s more, the researchers have found evidence of a pre-Harappan civilization that existed for at least 1,000 years before this. As per a report published in Times of India, this may force a global rethink on the timelines of the so-called ‘cradles of civilization’. “We have recovered perhaps the oldest pottery from the civilization.


We used a technique called ‘optically stimulated luminescence’ to date pottery shards of the Early Mature Harappan time to nearly 6,000 years ago and the cultural levels of pre-Harappan Hakra phase as far back as 8,000 years,” said Anindya Sarkar, head of the department of geology and geophysics at IIT-Kgp. Archaeological studies had earlier suggested that the civilization was centered around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan, and Lothal, Dholavira, and Kalibangan in India.


In recent years excavation at Rakhigarhi and few other places indicate that the civilization probably was more expansive than thought before.

Whatever may be the extent most Harappan settlements grew in the floodplains of river systems including those of the Indus or now defunct Ghaggar-Hakra (mythical river Saraswati?).



(Left) Map of Northwest India and Pakistan showing the locations of main Harappan settlements. (Right) Panoramic view of the excavation of mature Harappan stage at Bhirrana.


They took their dig to an unexplored site, Bhirrana — and ended up unearthing something much bigger.


The excavation also yielded large quantities of animal remains like bones, teeth, horn cores of cow, goat, deer and antelope, which were put through Carbon 14 analysis to decipher antiquity and the climatic conditions in which the civilization flourished, said Arati Deshpande Mukherjee of Deccan College, which helped analyse the finds along with Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.

Our study shows that the pre-Harappan humans started inhabiting this area along the Ghaggar-Hakra rivers in a climate that was favorable for human settlement and agriculture. The monsoon was much stronger between 9000 years and 7000 years from now and probably fed these rivers making them mightier with vast floodplains,” – Deshpande Mukherjee.

While the earlier phases were represented by pastoral and early village farming communities, the mature Harappan settlements were highly urbanized with organised cities, and a much developed material and craft culture.


They also had regular trade with Arabia and Mesopotamia. The Late Harappan phase witnessed large-scale de-urbanization, drop in population, abandonment of established settlements, lack of basic amenities, violence and even the disappearance of the Harappan script, the researchers say.

THE STUDY REVEALED THAT MONSOON STARTED WEAKENING 7,000 YEARS AGO BUT, SURPRISINGLY, THE CIVILIZATION DID NOT DISAPPEAR.

The Indus Valley people were very resolute and flexible and continued to evolve even in the face of declining monsoon. The people shifted their crop patterns from large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species like rice in the latter part.


As the yield diminished, the organised large storage system of the Mature Harappan period gave way to more individual household-based crop processing and storage systems that acted as a catalyst for the de-urbanisation of the civilization rather than an abrupt collapse, they say.

Source: Oxygen isotope in archaeological bioapatites from India: Implications to climate change and decline of Bronze Age Harappan civilization.

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Severe droughts explain the mysterious fall of the Maya

[b]We might finally know why the Maya abandoned their impressive limestone cities about 1,000 years ago

When the Spanish conquistadores sailed for Central America in 1517, their goal was to vanquish the resident Maya civilisation. But the colonists arrived to find that much of their work had been done for them.


The Maya’s towering limestone cities – a classic feature of one of the ancient world’s most advanced societies – were already being reclaimed by the jungle.


The question of how the Maya met their end is one of history's most enduring mysteries. The Maya people survived; they even managed to stage a long resistance to European rule.


But by the time the Spanish made landfall, the political and economic power which had erected the region's iconic pyramids, and had at one time sustained a population of some two million people, had vanished.


The first Maya sites were built during the first millennium BC, and the civilisation reached its height around AD600. (In the chronology of Mesoamerica, the Maya sit between the earlier Olmec and later Aztec civilisations).


Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of ancient Maya cities, most of which are spread across southern Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Belize and Guatemala.


It’s likely that still more Maya ruins lie hidden beneath the region’s thick tropical forest.


After about 200 years of serious archaeological study, we know enough about the Maya to be suitably impressed. Their distinctive art and architecture prove that these were master craftspeople.


The Maya were also intellectually advanced. They had a strong grasp of mathematics and astronomy, which they used to align their pyramids and temples with the precession of planets and the solar equinoxes. And they used the only known written script in Mesoamerica, a bizarre-looking set of characters known as Maya hieroglyphs.


The marvels the Maya left behind have earned them an enduring mystique. But the way the civilisation met its end is every bit as curious.


Let’s start with what we know. Around AD850, after centuries of prosperity and dominance, the Maya began to abandon their great cities, one after another. In less than 200 years, the civilisation had slumped to a fraction of its former glory. There would be later isolated resurgences, but the grandeur of the Maya’s heyday was gone forever.



Apart from its dramatic scale, what makes the Maya collapse so striking is that, despite decades of study, archaeologists still cannot agree on what caused it. As with the Roman Empire, there probably wasn’t one single culprit for the Maya’s downfall. But the nature of their decline leads some researchers to believe that the Maya civilisation fell victim to a major catastrophe – one able to topple city after city in its wake.


There are abundant theories about what finished off the Maya.


There are the old favourites – invasion, civil war, collapsing trade routes – but ever since the first Central American ancient climate records were pieced together in the early 1990s, one theory has become particularly popular: that the Maya civilisation was ultimately doomed by a period of severe climate change.


In the centuries immediately before the Maya collapse – the so-called “Classical Age” between about AD250 and 800 – the civilisation boomed. Cities flourished and harvests were good.


Climate records (which mostly come from the analysis of cave formations) show that during this time the Maya area had received relatively high rainfall. But the same records show that, starting in about AD820, the region was ravaged by 95 years of punctuated droughts, some of which lasted for decades.


ever since these droughts were first identified, researchers have noticed a striking correlation between their timing and that of the Maya collapse: most of the Classic Maya cities fell between AD850 and 925 – largely coincident with the century of drought.


And while a simple correlation isn’t enough to close the case, the tight fit between the droughts and the downfall leads many experts to believe that the 9th Century climate shift might somehow have caused the Maya’s demise.


But attractive as the drought explanation is, one piece of evidence has been standing in its way. Because, while most Maya cities declined as the climate dried, not all did.


The Maya cities which fell during the 9th Century droughts were mostly located in the southern portion of their territory, in modern day Guatemala and Belize. In the Yucatan peninsula to the north, however, the Maya civilisation not only survived through these droughts, it then began to flourish.


While the southern Maya civilisation began to disintegrate, the north enjoyed relative prosperity, with the rise of a number of thriving urban centres. These included one of the greatest of all Maya cities, Chichen Itza (one of the world’s “New Seven Wonders”).


This northern resurgence flies against the drought theory of the Maya’s demise: if the south was permanently crippled by the climate shift, critics argue, then why wasn’t the north?


Researchers have proposed various explanations for this north-south discrepancy, but so far no one theory has won out. Recently, however, a new discovery has gone some way towards resolving this enduring paradox.





Almost none of the Maya’s written records, which once numbered in the thousands, survived past colonial times (on the order of Catholic priests, the Spanish burned Maya books wholesale - only four are now known to exist). Instead, to determine the times that ancient Maya cities thrived, researchers rely on calendar inscriptions on stone monuments, stylistic analysis of the Maya’s ornate ceramics, and radiocarbon dates from organic materials.


Earlier studies had already determined the approximate ages of the main urban centres in the northern Maya civilisation; it was these that had revealed that the north had endured the 9th Century droughts.


However until recently this haul of data had never been gathered together in a single study. Doing so is important, because it allows the northern Maya region to be viewed as a whole, helping researchers to identify overarching trends in its rise and fall.


Now, in a study published in December, archaeologists from the US and the UK have brought together for the first time all of the calculated ages for urban centres in the northern Maya lands. These comprise about 200 dates from sites across the Yucatan peninsula, half obtained from stone calendar inscriptions and half from radiocarbon dating.


The researchers could then construct a broad picture of what times the northern Maya cities had been active, and the times when they each might have fallen into decline.


What the team found significantly changes our understanding of when, and perhaps even how the Maya civilisation met its end. Contrary to previous belief, the north had suffered a decline during a time of drought - in fact, it had suffered two of them.


The number of stone calendar inscriptions declined in times of drought (Credit: Image Source/Alamy)



There was a 70% decline in stone calendar inscriptions in the second half of the 9th Century.


This same pattern of decline is also echoed in radiocarbon dates across the northern Maya region, which indicate that wooden construction also dwindled during the same time period. Importantly, this is the time that the droughts are believed to have caused the collapse of the Maya civilisation in the south – evidently the north didn’t come through these droughts unscathed after all.


The researchers believe that this waning of creative activity shows that political and societal collapse was underway in the north. The north certainly fared better than the south during the 9th Century, but these new findings suggest that the region nevertheless suffered a significant decline.


This northern decline had previously escaped detection mostly due to the subtle nature of the evidence: a decline in construction, even one as large as this, is hard to spot without the comprehensive, region-wide analysis provided by the new study.


The northern decline of the 9th Century is an intriguing new detail in the Maya’s story, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter it - after all, we already knew that the northern Maya had survived past the 9th Century droughts (Chichen Itza and other centres thrived until well into the 10th Century).


But the second decline the team identified does change our understanding of the Maya’s story. After a short recovery during the 10th Century (which, interestingly, was coincident with an increase in rainfall), the researchers noticed another slump in construction at numerous sites across the northern Maya territory: stone carving and other building activity seems to have fallen by almost half between AD1000 and 1075. What’s more, just like the crisis 200 years earlier, the researchers discovered that this 11th Century Maya decline also took place against a backdrop of severe drought.


And not just any drought. The ones in the 9th Century had certainly been severe. But the 11th Century brought the worst drought that the region had seen for fully 2,000 years - a “megadrought”.



The 11th Century Maya decline occurred during a period of severe drought (Credit: YAY Media AS/Alamy)


After a short recovery there was another slump in construction in the north – against a backdrop of severe drought.


Climate records show that rainfall diminished dramatically for the best part of a century, between around AD1020 and 1100 - a snug fit with the archaeologically derived dates for the collapse of the northern Maya. One correlation doesn’t mean much on its own. But find two, and even sceptics might start to whisper “causation”.



The 11th Century megadrought had been implicated in the fall of the northern Maya before, but the dating techniques used had given ambiguous ages, making it hard to tell if the timings of the two events really did overlap. The comprehensive analysis published in the December study lets us say with much greater certainty that climate change was contemporaneous with not one, but two devastating periods of Maya decline.


If the first wave of droughts had finished off the Maya in the south, it looks like the second wave may have brought on their demise in the north.


After this second wave of droughts there was to be no real recovery for the Maya. Chichen Itza and most of the other important centres in the north would never rise again. There would be small but noteworthy exceptions - such as the northern city of Mayapan which flourished from the 13th to 15th centuries - but these would never rival the size and complexity of the Classic Maya cities. In many ways, the 11th Century was the Maya’s last gasp.


With these findings, it looks even more likely that climate change played a significant role in the Maya’s downfall.


But how?


The Maya were highly dependent on crops


Most archaeological explanations for the collapse involve agriculture. The Maya, like all large civilisations, were heavily dependent on crops for their economic might - and of course to sustain their vast workforce.


The simplest explanation for the Maya’s fall is that year-upon-year of low crop yields, brought on by the droughts, may have gradually diminished the Maya’s political influence, eventually leading to full-on societal disintegration.


But even advocates of the drought hypothesis admit that the picture is bound to be more nuanced than that.


“We know that there was already increased warfare and socio-political instability throughout the Maya area prior to the 9th Century droughts,” says Julie Hoggarth at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who co-led December’s climate analysis.


Inter-city conflict is a pretty good way to break up a civilisation too; it’s possible that the Maya just fought themselves apart. But that still leaves the question of the droughts, and those well fitting dates.


Perhaps, then, it was a mixture of the two. As food stocks shrank during the dry decades, competition for resources would probably have become even more intense, perhaps eventually reaching a tipping point which caused the ancient Maya civilisation to fracture irreparably.


It's possible that the Maya just fought themselves apart (Credit: JORDI CAMÍ/Alamy)


But there’s at least one other explanation that doesn’t require any warfare. It may not have been the Maya’s dark side that doomed them, but their talents. Because, while the Maya were famously great craftsmen, but they were also environmental sculptors.


To grow enough food to feed their millions, the Maya dug huge systems of canals, sometimes hundreds of miles across, which allowed them to drain and elevate the infertile wetlands which cover much of the Maya heartland, producing new arable land (some archaeologists call these “floating gardens”). The Maya also cleared huge tracts of forest, both for agriculture and to make room for their cities.


Some scholars think that the Maya’s skilled manipulation of their environment could have had a hand in their eventual collapse, by somehow worsening the impacts of natural climate change. For example, some scholars think that deforestation to clear land for agriculture might have exacerbated localised drying effects, leading to more significant agricultural losses during drought.


A more indirect consequence of their agricultural prowess might simply have been that it allowed the population to grow too large, which might have increased their vulnerability to an extended food shortage, and therefore reduced their resistance to a drier climate.


Mesoamerica’s famous civilisation mysteriously fell about 1,000 years ago (Credit: Age fotostock/Alamy)


Whatever the reason – or reasons – for the Maya’s collapse, we do know something about the fate of the people who were left to face its aftermath. Starting around AD1050, the Maya took to the road.


They abandoned the inland regions where their ancestors had thrived, and made their way in droves towards the Caribbean coast, or to other sources of water, such as the lakes and sinkholes which occasionally punctuate the dense green of the Maya’s former territory.


The exodus of the Maya people may have been motivated by hunger. If the crops had indeed failed following the 9th and 11th Century droughts, relocating nearer water might have made sense, either to access seafood or to take advantage of the wetter land near the sea. Whatever the reason, moisture was clearly on their minds.


But then again, that had always been the case. One of the duties of a Maya ruler was to commune with the gods to ensure a wet year and good harvests.


At sites across the Maya world, archaeologists have dredged up human bones from the bottom of lakes and sinkholes - thought to be doorways to the underworld: grim evidence that the people resorted to sacrifice to appease their deities. When the rains were good, and the civilisation blossomed, it must have seemed like their prayers were being answered.

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Kalash women in Pakistan's remote mountains. The Kalash people's way of life is under threat from climate change.

Ancient Kalash People in Remote Pakistan Hit by Climate Change, Deforestation

The culture, rituals and existence of the small Kalash community—living in three remote valleys of Chitral district in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range in northwest Pakistan—are under threat from various factors associated with climate change.

There are believed to be only about 4,000 Kalash living in this region. With their light complexions and rituals centred on a worship of nature, some say they are the descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great, which invaded the area in the 4th century BC.

“Kalashas are like a museum of this country and must be protected,” says Shahigul, a Kalash community leader in the Bumburet valley, close to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.


Erratic Monsoon


“In the past, our culture and rituals were under threat from outsiders, but now we are much more worried about our future due to recurring flashfloods in our valleys,” she says.

Sudden downpours and an increasingly erratic monsoon—together with the ever-present danger of earthquakes—are taking their toll on the Kalash, who are dependent on the land for their livelihood.

The melting of glaciers in the Hindu Kush mountain range and sudden surges of water in mountain valleys is another threat.

“We lost our houses, crops, orchards and livestock last year due to flooding, and now there is little left for us,” Shahigul says.

Locals say the climate in their long, steep valleys is changing. They say that deforestation is another reason for the increased occurrence of flash floods in the region, with outsiders coming in to chop down trees.

Changing Cycles, Different Weather

Bajur Khan, another senior figure in the Kalash community, says the 2015 flooding—which also destroyed centuries-old walnut trees—was particularly bad.

“Almost eighty percent of my arable land was washed away,” he says. “I managed to rescue just two forty-kilogram sacks of maize, instead of the usual thirty sacks I used to collect each year. We are scared about the future and want to leave the area.”

The Kalash, and the mountain valleys they live in, were once a magnet for local and foreign tourists, providing income that helped these unique communities to survive.

But now there are few visitors in the area – due to changes in climate and to security issues associated with the Taliban and conflict in nearby Afghanistan.

The Kalash have fought hard to retain their customs and their special way of life. Although some have become Muslim, most still follow animistic religious traditions.

The women also continue to wear their intricate, colourful costumes, and there is a lively round of festivals, with music and dancing, red wine and organic food. Funerals in the Kalash community are particularly lavish affairs.

Infrastructure Repair

The Kalash say local government officials have colluded with timber merchants who come to chop down trees. And they say that little has been done to repair roads and bridges destroyed in the floods.

Government officials say the Pakistan army has helped repair some infrastructure. They also say the flash floods of 2015 were due to cloudbursts, and that deforestation was not responsible for the damage caused.

But Amir Muhammad Khan, programme manager at Focus Humanitarian Assistance, an international organisation that supports emergency relief following natural disasters, says weather patterns in Chitral have completely changed in recent years.

“The patterns of the rains has altered, with sudden monsoon rainfalls in the summer months,” he says. “The growing cycle of crops and fruit has also changed. We are seeing very different weather.”

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Archaeologists uncover new clues to Maya collapse

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—Using the largest set of radiocarbon dates ever obtained from a single Maya site, archaeologists have developed a high-precision chronology that sheds new light on patterns leading up to the two major collapses of the ancient civilization.

Archaeologists have long puzzled over what caused what is known as the Classic Maya collapse in the ninth century A.D., when many of the ancient civilization's cities were abandoned. More recent investigations have revealed that the Maya also experienced an earlier collapse in the second century A.D.—now called the Preclassic collapse—that is even more poorly understood.


University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues suggest in a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that both collapses followed similar trajectories, with multiple waves of social instability, warfare and political crises leading to the rapid fall of many city centers.

The findings are based on a highly refined chronology developed by Inomata and his colleagues using an unprecedented 154 radiocarbon dates from the archaeological site of Ceibal in Guatemala, where the team has worked for over a decade.

While more general chronologies might suggest that the Maya collapses occurred gradually, this new, more precise chronology indicates more complex patterns of political crises and recoveries leading up to each collapse


"What we found out is that those two cases of collapse (Classic and Preclassic) follow similar patterns," said Inomata, the paper's lead author and a professor in the School of Anthropology in the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "It's not just a simple collapse, but there are waves of collapse. First, there are smaller waves, tied to warfare and some political instability, then comes the major collapse, in which many centers got abandoned. Then there was some recovery in some places, then another collapse."

Using radiocarbon dating and data from ceramics and highly controlled archaeological excavations, the researchers were able to establish the refined chronology of when population sizes and building construction increased and decreased at Ceibal.



Archaeologists excavate the royal palace of Ceibal, which was burned during the Classic Maya collapse in the ninth century. Credit: Takeshi Inomata/University of Arizona

While the findings may not solve the mystery of why exactly the Maya collapses occurred, they are an important step toward better understanding how they unfolded.

"It's really, really interesting that these collapses both look very similar, at very different time periods," said Melissa Burham, one of three UA anthropology graduate students who co-authored the paper. "We now have a good understanding of what the process looked like, that potentially can serve as a template for other people to try to see if they have a similar pattern at their (archaeological) sites in the same area."

Inomata and his UA colleagues—anthropology professor Daniela Triadan and students Burham, Jessica MacLellan and Juan Manuel Palomo—worked with collaborators at Ibaraki University, Naruto University of Education and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan, and with Guatemalan archaeologists and students.

Radiocarbon dating was done at Paleo Laboratory Company in Japan and at the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory in the UA Department of Physics.

"Radiocarbon dating has been used for a long time, but now we're getting to an interesting period because it's getting more and more precise," said Inomata, who also is an Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the UA. "We're getting to the point where we can get to the interesting social patterns because the chronology is refined enough, and the dating is precise enough.

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