The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe (2005) | Hacker News Reader

The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe (2005)

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160 pointsdmlhllnd159 comments

Related topic is the "Great Dying" which killed the majority of Native Americans:

http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html

Of note is how smallpox was used as a weapon:

>> "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians, by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." — Jeffery Amherst

Sources:

Disease as a weapon against Native Americans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_...

Smallpox Blankets http://cherokeeregistry.com/index.php?option=com_content&vie...

I am proud to be an American but ...

We used Germ Warfare to a whole new level vs Native Americans. (Germ warfare was used throughout history AKA throwing dead things into fortifications etc)

We are the only country to have used Nuclear Weapons

But in terms of killing nothing compares to Mosquitoes with them spreading malaria, dengue and yellow fever. Malaria kills 2,700,000 a year.

Biowarfare has a long history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfar...

Some believe that dead bodies infected with the black plague were catapulted over the walls in the siege of Kaffe.

I live in the US but I'm not taking credit for the smallpox thing. That was the doing of a few people at most, and I'm not one of them. I don't think it was even official policy, so my great grandfathers vote can't be implicated either.

I get very tired of the collective American guilt trip. I don't see how it does anyone any good.

What collective American guilt trip

Or the collective not my issue I wasn't alive pass the buck.

So what I got a full deck of cards and you got less. It wasn't my system so deal with it and don't make me own my advantage.

It's possible to affect positive change without being burdened by personal or historical guilt.

Yeah that worked so well US certainly doesn't have people caring about our past and trying to kill us.

If you want everyone to love you, be a kitten.

There isn't a country or a demographic in the world that isn't hated by someone.

Switzerland? New Zealand?

> Switzerland?

I'd wager that some people are pretty unhappy with their behavior during World War II.

> New Zealand?

I've got nothin'.

I mean, we're also trying to kill them. All this anger didn't come from nowhere.

I fully own all of my advantages and make a conscious decision not to share any of them with you, because you're an asshole.

I get the feeling that this is was the attitude take by the people who did all those bad things in the first place. Maybe they would have explained it as 'what god gave them'.

But that's neither here nor there - it's either your system now, to try and make things more equitable for the next people to come along, or you are part of what's keeping the unjust system in place.

So, sure, there's no reason to feel guilty for whatever anyone did, whenever they did it, and however much DNA you share with them. But, what >you< do to fix it, well, that is your responsibility, and your guilt if you do not.

It's not my responsibility to "fix" things that can't be fixed like greed and hate and violence from centuries ago. I don't believe there is a governmental social program that can fix it either.

The only thing I can do is try my best to be a good and fair and kind person in the time I'm in now. I can't atone for what assholes centuries ago did even if I wanted to.

This collective blame assignment is the same kind of evil thinking that led to someone trying to wipe out a race in the first place.

Read "American Holocaust" The Conquest of the New World by David Stannard. You will have a different conception of that period of history. After reading it I was convinced there was an official policy of wiping out the native inhabitants, which was largely successful. The smallpox may have been accidental, but beyond that it was genocide, in both South and North America.

Tribes wiped each other out from time to time. Native tribes did at as well as pale tribes coming over in boats.

It's awful. I don't think people should do it anymore. But "native inhabitants" isn't a uniform group any more than "white men". And both groups have had their share of unsavory individuals.

They fought but not with the degree of murderous violence that Europeans had, and native Americans were immediately enslaved, called subhuman, savaged etc and were deliberately exterminated without trying to hide the fact. Like I said I thought it was an exaggeration but having read the book, it changed my perspective on history.

When the first European explorers arrived in South America, there was a massive and advanced civilisation there. Far greater and larger than I ever thought. Massive cities were destroyed, some of them engineering marvels. The enslavement and murder of native Americans continued there for centuries.

Not with the degree of murderous violence?

You are aware of what the Aztecs (for instance) did with enslaved tribes?

They may have been brutal but I think it was exceeded by the scale of the European brutality. Are you aware of what Europeans did with captured natives? Made them work in silver mines in horrendous conditions, bound together with irons around their necks. Then if one fell down a mountain the whole gang did.

Even if it was official policy, it would have been official policy of the British government. The United States did not exist at the time of the weaponization of smallpox at Fort Pitt. Jeffrey Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief in North America at the time, was never on the colonies' side during the Revolutionary War.

English government, not British. I think? Don't imagine Scotland and Wales had much say.

But it may give you a different perspective as to how to deal with the problems of native Americans and disadvantaged communities today.

How so? These things happened a long time ago. At some point, we need to stop blaming all of their woes on decades or century old treatment.

Most immigrants were used as essentially slave labor at some point. The Chinese, for instance, were used to build the railroads in the US. The Italians and Irish were also treated poorly for decades.

I doubt it.

Seriously... this whole "you are a white man so you share blame for anything a white man ever did" is absolutely stupid.

Nor does collective national pride do net good.

How about Japan.

Net good?

Outside of the siege of Ft. Pitt (where most seem to consider the attempt ineffective), when else was germ warfare tried in the colonies/USA?

Re nuclear weapons - the context matters. There were predictions of over 1M allied casualties for an invasion of the Japanese mainland and after the bitter fighting during previous campaigns it seems plausible. https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-United-States-attack-Japan... has a great summary of the other factors (Total war, an unwillingness by the Japanese military to surrender, the context of nuclear vs conventional bombing, speculation about future conflicts).

You really should read the debate about the bombing:

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-05/hiroshima-bombing-did-...

Also, the poster above stated a simple fact: no other country has ever used nukes in anger. I don't think it's necessary to contextualize this simple statement.

I'm familiar with it. Personally I don't see any clear or compelling evidence that the bombings did not play a role in ending the war. It's not as if the Allied Commanders had direct access to the inner circle of Japanese leaders at the time. History is never as black and white as some may portray it - I don't doubt that there were many complex reasons for the decision to use the bombs and the decision made by the Japanese to surrender.

Personally, I also think it's a bit ridiculous to be ashamed of the fact that the US dropped two nuclear weapons as part of ending a global war. These were primitive weapons compared to what is available now. Were they any worse than the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden? Any worse than the atrocities in Nanking? Worse than the Holocaust or actions of the Einsatzgruppen? What about the Katyn Forest? Comfort Women? The treatment of POWs? WW2 was full of horrible events that every nation could be ashamed of but let's not forget the context of the conflict and who the aggressors were.

Don't blame the mosquitoes for that. They don't know they are killing the source they 'milk' for food.

I don't think it's fair to group the nuclear attacks with smallpox warfare. They were done for extremely different reasons.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C Mann is a great book about the Americas before Columbus (who arrived in 1492). One of the things it covers (with evidence), is the disease outbreak which killed millions and millions of people.

He's a pop-sci author, so it's half a history book and half a science book ("We know this because of these historical documents, and then because of this scientific evidence)

That and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created are great reads.

One of the main points of 1491 was the evidence of disease decimating the Americas even prior to the arrival of Cortes.

Stories like this were one of the most interesting things I learned with home schooling. When you are bringing information to your kids to teach them about history, you want it to be accurate so, if you are like me, you try to find a number of sources about major events. And what I discovered was how these events are slanted, sometimes radically so, in service to a particular narrative.

Of the few things we found that were pretty universal, one was that a lot of people died from disease, before, during, and after people from Europe were visiting the American continents (both North and South), and upper class Europeans were often unashamedly racists and classists.

The origin of these appear to be the lack of understanding about diseases (transmission and virality) and our inability to proactively protect ourselves (vaccinate). And the history of feudal warlords favoring 'bloodlines' over individual competence. Often looking at events from the present, with the benefit if hindsight and greater knowledge, its easy to see how things could have been avoided and so it is easy to believe that they weren't avoided due to malice. And taking advantage of that, a number of historians have painted events to look like either malice of their enemies or heroism of their allies, rather than a dispassionate retelling of facts and figures.

Even today we see tragic events quickly contextualized into a conspiracy of shadowy groups with malicious agendas. when those re-contextualized accounts become the only surviving account, we lose a lot of perspective.

The Conquest of Mexico and New Spain, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32474/32474-h/32474-h.htm

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32475/32475-h/32475-h.htm

That's the bees knees and the cat's pajamas when it comes to the downfall of the Aztec Empire at the hands of Cortes' small band of conquistadores (plus a few thousand Tlascalans and other enemies of the Empire), a first-hand account from one of the conquistadores.

It's all in there: the pious, self-mutilating Aztec priests who practiced human sacrifice, the strange way the Mexicans did warfare and their reaction to muskets and horses, La Noche Triste and Alvarado's Leap, Moctezuma's death at the hands of his captors, Dona Marina, and of course, the deadliest part of it all, the decimation of the Mexican population by smallpox carried by the Europeans.

It's been called the most beautiful story ever told (no link, sorry) and it is. Beautiful, but also tragic, brutal, horrifying, bloody and full of senseless killing and pointless death and destruction.

You might want to read it if you enjoyed New Revelations...

Both of these are minor compared to Smallpox.

Smallpox is 10,000+ years old was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century alone. It killed between 20–60 percent of those infected and and over 80 percent of infected children. It caused lifetime issues for ~85% of the survivors including ~1/3 of all historical cases of blindness. As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.

Highlights include the epidemic of 735–737 is believed to have killed as much as one-third of the population. At least seven religious deities have been specifically dedicated to smallpox. By the mid-18th century smallpox was a major endemic disease everywhere in the world except in Australia and in several small islands. In Europe smallpox was a leading cause of death in the 18th century, killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five kings. Up to 10 percent of Swedish infants died of smallpox each year,[10] and the death rate of infants in Russia may have been even higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smallpox

Did not realize the depth of this. I guess I now understand why Europeans had decent immunity to it.. it was that or die.

Starting in the 18th century, people began inoculating themselves in large numbers. You'd do this with pus from a victim who had a mild case of it.

The Wikipedia article on variolation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation) is pretty interesting. Edward Jenner's development of Smallpox vaccination seemed much less revolutionary to me once I learned about Smallpox inoculation/variolation.

Variolation was still risky with a ~1% risk of death and a significant chance of starting a new outbreak. So, the vaccine was still a rediculusly huge step forward.

So basically Variolation was MySpace, and Vaccination was Facebook?

Took an existing idea, cranked it up a notch, and sold it to the masses?

Variolation was still risky with a significant risk of contracting the disease and thus death or even starting a new outbreak. So, the vaccine was still a rediculusly huge step forward.

When you dig into the history of almost anything, you find a backstory that is missing from the popular story. To me, that makes it more interesting, but I'm a nerdy want-to-kknow-how-it-really-works guy.

Great comment. It was truly an indiscriminate killer. I'm reminded of one of those kings -- the Sun King Louis XIV -- who made it to his elderly years. Then one day he has his kingly way with a 12 year old girl who happened to be carrying the disease.

Louis XIV died from a gangrene caused by a combination of gout and syphilis. Not from smallpox.

Ha, you are right. It was Louis XV.

It's been a while since I read French history.

How Louis XV got infected is unknown. There are several theories but not that one. The Parc-aux-Cerfs (place whet he was meeting girls brought there by Mme de Pompadour) was not in use for many years already (since Mme de Berry become his mistress).

While there are good reasons to lament the many bad things going on in the world today, it's pretty fucking amazing that a disease that kills half a billion people is now described on Wikipedia as:

> Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor.

"Was".

unfortunately it's still around, just not in the wild.

"Published in History TodayVolume 55 Issue 3 March 2005"

The article is a bit old, and misses out on the large amount of genetic evidence since then sequenced and analyzed. Cui et al found that the closest living relatives to the Black Death stem from north-west China. That is about the only evidence we have on where the Black Death came from, and it does point to an origin in or near China.

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/2/577.figures-only

"If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place."

What is that from and what does it mean?

It's apparently from a muslim religious text. I found this very interesting because it's a rule that covers both self-preservation ("don't enter the infected zone") and quarantine ("if infected, stay where you are"). It's an early containment protocol.

What seems most fascinating to me is that by proscribing this from a religious channel, you can circumvent psychological mechanisms that would otherwise cause people to act in their own self interest - and in this case it actually works for the greater good.

Yes it's Islamic. It's a Mohammad's saying (hadith).

Here's the source in Arabic and English:

http://sunnah.com/urn/53720

Somewhat earlier, ~1400 BC, the book of Leviticus chapters 13-14 detail quarantine procedures for infectious disease.

As a Muslim HN reader, I never expected to see one of Prophet Mohammed's sayings in a comment. There's a first time for everything I guess!

I grew up in Derbyshire and remember being taught at a young age about the village of Eyam that quarantined itself when the plague arrived on an infected parcel of damp cloth from London.

"It's hard to imagine that the quiet village of Eyam, off the A623 in Derbyshire, could have such a fascinating, yet tragic story to tell. But .... at the end of August 1665 bubonic plague arrived at the house of the village tailor George Viccars, via a parcel of cloth from London. The cloth was damp and was hung out in front of the fire to dry, thus releasing the plague infested fleas. On 7th September 1665, George Viccars, the first plague victim, died of a raging fever. As the plague took hold and decimated the villagers it was decided to hold the church services outdoors at nearby Cucklett Delf and, on the advice of rector William Mompesson and the previous incumbent Thomas Stanley, villagers stayed within the confines of the village to minimize the spread of the disease. Cucklett Delf was also the secret meeting place of sweethearts Emmott Sydall, from Eyam, and Rowland Torre, who was from a neighbouring village. They would call to each other across the rocks, until Emmott Sydall herself became a victim of the plague. Six of the eight Sydall family died, and their neighbours lost nine family members."

"To minimize cross infection, food and other supplies were left outside the village, at either the Boundary Stones, or at Mompesson's Well, high above the village. The Earl of Devonshire, who lived at Chatsworth House, freely donated food and medical supplies. For all other goods, money, as payment, was either purified by the running water in the well or was left in vinegar soaked holes. The Riley graves, close to Riley House Farm and approximately 1/2 mile from the village house the bodies of the husband and six children of farmer Elizabeth Hancock. All died within a week of each other. Because of the high risk of infecting her neighbours she had the traumatic task of burying them all herself. Even more tragic is that the infection probably came to her family when she helped bury another villager's body. Twelve months after the death of George Vicars, the plague was still claiming its victims, and on 25th August 1666 Catherine Mompesson, wife of the recently appointed rector William Mompesson (aged 28) , died of the plague. She had loyally stayed with her husband and tended the sick, only to become a victim herself."

"The Plague in Eyam raged for 14 months and claimed the lives of at least 260 villagers. By 1st November 1666 it had run its course and claimed its last victim. Eyam's selfless villagers, with their strong Christian convictions, had shown immense personal courage and self sacrifice. They had prevented the plague from spreading to other parishes, but many paid the ultimate price for their commitment."

http://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk/htm/outandabout/eyam.htm

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

I wonder whether the cleanliness discipline of Islam (washing before prayers, etc.) has made any difference to public health in Muslim-majority places? Conversely, does the vast yearly Hajj gathering ever have the unintended consequence of spreading epidemics worldwide?

> vast yearly Hajj gathering ever have the unintended consequence of spreading epidemics worldwide?

Hajj epidemiology is indeed a fairly active field.

As mentioned in another comment, smallpox has killed more than it's fair share of humans. An estimated 300 million in the 20th century alone[0].

Maybe lesser known is the Spanish Flu which killed more than 50 million people worldwide within 2 years (1918, 1919). The strangest thing is that it seems to have largely targeted young and healthy adults (it, like the Black Plague, seems to have originated in China[1]).

[0] -http://www.who.int/about/bugs_drugs_smoke_chapter_1_smallpox... [1] - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140123-spani...

The Spanish flu's mortality isn't that mysterious today (samples have been extracted from victims buried in cold climates, and its genome sequenced). It turns out that in young, healthy victims it provokes a cytokine storm -- an overreaction by the immune system that causes a massive inflammatory response and fluid build-up in the lungs (with potential for secondary bacterial infection). Ironically, older or younger victims with weaker immune systems were less likely to succumb to this reaction:

More here: https://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2014/20140227oldstonerose...

FYI, the article specifically talks about how the Black Plague did not originate in China.

"The infection takes three–five days to incubate in people before they fall ill, and another three–five days before, in 80 per cent of the cases, the victims die."

Takes at least 6 days for the infected to die. That's a really deadly disease. Even Ebola was not that fast. The WHO website mentioned that it takes 21 days for Ebola patient to show just the symptoms, which could mean it would still take few more days for the patient to die.

Doesn't that make Ebola more deadly? 21 days walking around, spreading it.

That's another way of thinking. But a deadly disease is one where death is certain and fatality rate is high. You could say that Ebola had higher chances of spreading, along with being deadly.

Transmission of Ebola occurs only after patient develops the symptoms of the disease anywhere between 2 days and 3 weeks after infection [1]. By then most patients are not in a condition to be "walking around".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease

Ok. I was later thinking that this might be the case. Thank you for finding it.

My understanding is that Ebola is not very contagious. You need physical contact for the disease to spread. Which is why there was some many victims among nurses and doctors. But also why it is unlikely you will be contaminated if you sit 5 hours in a plane next to someone carrying the disease.

And the interesting thing about Ebola is that while it's not very contagious it is extremely infectious. Which means that you need contact with just a few virus particles to be infected.

And then it's game over, low survival rate. Which makes it scary but not very dangerous.

I would bet the deadliness of Ebola has been overstated (at least by a little, probably by a lot). Like any infection, many people who get it are probably asymptomatic, and until recently the vast majority of people tested for it were most definitely symptomatic. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/ebola-study-fin...

It turns out its not actually all that infectious either. It's just very, very hard to sustain not having contact with infectious fluid for very long.

This is partly why there have been rival Ebola-like 'haemorrhagic plague' theories of the Black Death, although they're still niche theories.

Confusing matters is the fact that some accounts of symptoms make it sound like Pneumonic plague was also affecting victims, and killing them even faster. Possibly there was some perfect storm of plagues spreading through multiple vectors at once, with haemorrhagic pneumonic and bubonic plagues striking at different places with different frequencies.

Without a means to distinguish between the plagues (and other diseases), pretty much any death caused by communicable disease would at the time be considered part of the Black Death.

Ebola can be quite fast. 4 to 10 days incubation period and then death may occur in the next 6 to 16.

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

Diseases which kill immediately upon contact don't tend to spread. It's the ones that sit silently and don't harm you that spread everywhere (e.g. HIV)

many people are convinced today that the (smallpox and other) epidemics introduced to north america by european settlers were real. allegedly 100m native american people inhabited north america before and it is assumed that 90% fell victim to these epidemics. that would make it a greater catastrophe, measured by number of casualties, if i'm not mistaken?

That was for sure a big catastrophe, but where did you get your numbers?

"The population figure for indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus has proven difficult to establish. Scholars rely on archaeological data and written records from settlers from the Old World. Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated the pre-Columbian population as low as 10 million; by the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitate to a middle estimate of around 50 million, with some historians arguing for 100 million or more." - that's for both North and South America.

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

The population numbers are a matter of huge dispute.

But there is recent genetic evidence that a severe narrowing of genetic diversity happened across the continent. And a fairly recent one.

< many people are convinced today that the (smallpox and other) epidemics introduced to north america by european settlers were real.

Out of curiosity, why do you word it this way? I'm curious because I have a coworker that thinks the smallpox story is some evil liberal conspiracy of some sort, and never happened. Yet I see only evidence for, not against.

Mass death from disease clearly happened. I think there is some room to question how much of it was intentional. Clearly some of it was intentional, but if diseases unthinkingly carried over on the first voyages are responsible for a large number of the deaths, we should take note of that.

i tried to word it neutral with regard to intentionality. after what i read it was considered more of a tragedy then anything else, but i think there are new interpretations, which are also mentioned in comments above.

Compared to the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the black death barely qualifies as a mishap, let alone the greatest catastrophe ever !

For humans, it was the greatest catastrophe. Remember Permian-Triassic period didn't just affected one species and there were no humans during that period. You could say our ancestors were affected though.

There is the Toba catastrophe theory - basically that the huge eruption of Toba caused a reduction of the number of breeding pairs of humans down to a few thousand:

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

Hasn't the Toba theory been discredited?

Perhaps the volcano wasn't the cause, but IIRC there's reason to think that humans display less genetic diversity than might be expected, pointing towards a bottleneck somewhere in the past.

Humans are very unusual from a genetic perspective that makes analysis of us difficult. Firstly, the population has expand hugely in a very short time so there are all sorts of founder effects. Secondly, the selection presure completely changed a few thousand years ago with the transition from hunter-gather to farming. These two factors make it really hard to use the normal genetic tools and concepts to study human evolution and draw accurate conclusions.

This is the first I have heard about Toba Catastrophe. I must suck at prehistoric history.

Well, as danieltillett points out, it seems to have been discredited but the eruption definitely did happen:

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

Tell that to the synapsids. Tell that to the trilobites! Tell them that straight to their faces, if you can find one.

Supernovae and GRBs are chuckling right now. ;)

well if we stick to modern issues, world war 2 would make the black death down on the lists. the number of deaths that occurred during government caused famines in China (great leap) and Russia have estimates that are worse and I would classify them are worse than the Black Death because they were purposeful and fully avoidable.

It is one thing to have a virulent disease wipe out an ignorant people with limited communication and scientific ability to cope. It is wholly another what is done purposefully by governments to their own and others. Japan, China, and Russia, all have been guilty of incredible death tolls because of treatment of their own people and those they conquered. If anything that make the Nazi's look like amateurs but for the most part they get a pass for their past transgressions

The Black Death was followed by about 400 years of plague outbreaks in Europe. It also struck the Middle East, Africa, the Caucausus and Russia. It is bloody hard to make a total tally of how many people died by plague.

But the Black Death itself was special in that it was such a condensed and intense disaster. If you have the chance to read the eyewitness accounts, as collected by Rosemary Horrox it is quite impressive.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Death-Manchester-Medieval-Source...

I also really liked "History of the Plague in London" (http://www.amazon.com/History-Plague-London-Daniel-Defoe-ebo...)

Or compare to the Oxygen catastrophe [1], when cyanobacteria caused death of virtually all aerobic species.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

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

> The novel explores how subsequent world history might have been different if the Black Death plague had killed 99% of Europe's population, instead of a third.

it's an interesting effort to imagine human civilisation guided primarily by buddhism and islam, without christianity ever ascending.

I'll also point out that like with aftershocks with earthquakes, there were multiple smaller waves of plagues after this initial event, breaking out in various regions over subsequent centuries.

It seemed to have died down after around 1700, but there were regular plague outbreaks up to that point. None were as widespread or as devastating as the initial outbreak, although that was of small comfort to those thousands that did die in later outbreaks.

While we are on this topic I would like to recommend to all who have not seen it yet "The Seventh Seal", Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece on dealing with death and God's silence when we face it. Action is set in medieval Sweden, during the time of the Black Death plague.

The opening scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4yXBIigZbg

Has anyone read this book that proposes the "black death" was due to meteor/comet strikes? I have been interested in doing so but never got around to it.

http://www.amazon.com/Light-Black-Death-Mike-Baillie/dp/0752...

Glanced at the abstract, and the amazon reviews. The medieval medical guilds were well aware of the clinical symptoms of the Black Death, so I wonder how Mike Baillie connects the characteristic buboes of the plague with meteor strikes?

I enjoyed reading this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632865/

The paper highlights several aspects of plague that were different between the second and third plague pandemic, and which caused a scientific movement that searched for alternative explanations for the Black Death - that is, until the Yersinia pestis bacterium got sequenced from multiple Black Death mass graves.

I'm not familiar with the arguments in the book, but in general it could be both. The impacts could disrupt society (eg via crop failure) which leads to a breakdown of sanitary practices and poverty which leads to spread of disease.

Many historians now think there were about 100 million people living in the Americas when Columbus arrived and disease reduced this to 2 million over the course of 150 years. All the atrocities of the Spanish combined couldn't come close to the ravages of disease from a populace that lived in their own filth.

There is a new book coming out about this focused on the Black Death in Ireland: http://irishhistorypodcast.ie/the-black-death/

Another terrible catastrophe was the colonisation of India, resulting ultimately in it's economic destruction, massive famines of millions of people etc. In fact a great catastrophe the western colonisation of the rest of the world starting from about 1497 in general. It was extraordinarily brutal throughout the world. For an excellent overview of this history of European colonisation of the world see Noam Chomsky's book "Year 501, The Conquest Continues". It's available online.

But the black death was obviously a major global catastrophe. In fact Europe was for centuries a most brutal place with disease, warfare, and oppression.

> In fact Europe was for centuries a most brutal place with disease, warfare, and oppression.

I'm not sure that only applies to Europe...

Of course not. Comparatively it was actually pretty bad. Worse than I thought it was, the gap between the first world and the third world was also much smaller in the past.

Or, as some might say, the best thing that ever happened to European society.

Paper became cheap because of a cotton glut and labour became expensive leading to egalitarian lifestyles.

The aristocracy were against egalitarian lifestyles immediately following the plague. A maximum wage system was established in England [0]

[0] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-09-05/how-the-bla...

One thing to remember is that a tremendous amount of wealth was passed to the survivors, and it was actually a boon for the recovering population.

Dubious placement of Frankfurt on the included map.

That is a valid Frankfurt :-) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_(Oder)

Ran into a lot of examples like that when merging two existing georeferenced datasets of plague outbreaks in Europe. Had to do quite some manual checking, and made good use of the damerau-levenshtein distance between two strings to recognize alternative spellings.

end-result here: https://figshare.com/articles/plague_outbreaks_in_medieval_E...

In Germany, it's common to have cities in different parts of Germany with the same name. In such cases, one usually puts a nearby geographic feature (usually a river) or region next to the name of the city.

In this particular case, it's Frankfurt (Main) vs Frankfurt (Oder).

I'm a little puzzled as to the inclusion of Frankfurt (Oder) on the map. It was a city of decent size in the Middle Ages, but nowhere near the importance of any of the other cities displayed on the map.

It basically comes down to data availability, and some historian digging through the available archives.

For example, Givry is a tiny place somewhere in France, but for which by happenstance the parish registers at the time of the Black Death survived. They record the daily number of deaths, which end abruptly when presumably the priest died after recording ~620 deaths since the beginning of the epidemic in that town. The town's population is estimated at around 1170 people, based on the death rate in the earlier months, leading to a lower end estimate of 53% mortality (if the death of the priest was also the end of the epidemic).

    (from page 306 of http://www.persee.fr/doc/bec_0373-6237_1939_num_100_1_449196)

    [0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 3 2 0 0] ;; jul. . approximate start of epidemic somewhere during jul.
    [0 4 4 1 0 2 1 7 5 3 1 1 4 5 3 3 4 1 5 2 2 4 3 6 2 2 2 6 3 8 4 6 10] ;; aug.
    [6 9 8 8 4 6 15 3 11 24 7 10 15 10 14 11 17 8 6 3 17 6 11 16 7 16 12 5 10 7] ;; sept
    [7 6 7 7 8 7 6 6 9 4 7 9 3 14 5 5 4 8 6 7 3 2 5 4 4 2 3 1 3 0 6] ;; oct
    [3 4 3 4 0 2 1 0 4 3 2 1 0 0 5 0 0 0 3] ;; nov, records end with the dead of the priest, worst of the epidemic is over.

It was not a big deal in Sweden. The government was acting fast to quarantine the areas. Mostly only children bellow 14 died. A few years later however most families had new children. All in all it was not a big deal for that point in time. Remember that back in those days most people had more children per person and death was a larger part of life than now.

This isn't true:

>>In the middle of the 14th century, Sweden was struck by the Black Death.[28] The population of Sweden and most of Europe was seriously decimated. And the population (at same territory) as existed by 1348 did not reach the same numbers again until the beginning of the 19th century. One third of the population died during 1349–1351.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden [2] http://staff.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/~cwalton/walton/SOLPics/...

You are wrong. Read Olle Larsson and Andreas Marklunds book Svensk Historia. http://www.bokus.com/bok/9789175452531/svensk-historia/

Authors can be wrong in interpreting the available (or lack of available) information. According to Ole Benedictow, there is little or no surviving records of plague in Sweden, but I would be curious to know why Larsson and Marklunds interpret that as that there was little plague there?

Ole Benedictow's chapter on Sweden (mainly discussing the lack of evidence, except for church donations) https://books.google.no/books?id=ZtjwPOB7aMkC&pg=PA170&dq=%2...

Stockholm in 1710-1711 had no problem in being rather brutally infected, with at its peak 1500 burials per week.

The Last plague in the Baltic Region from Frandsen: https://books.google.no/books?id=F3bNWrVRMb8C&pg=PA65&dq=%22...

True. Also I'm not saying people didnt die. But from what I've read, it was not such a huge deal as it has been painted out to be in Sweden. Remember, health care back in those days meant people died from all sorts of things. Perhaps there is a lack of information or it simply was not a big deal. Different people are also more or less sensitive to different bacteria and viruses.

Isn't that why religions have been so successful. They are not only a psychological coping mechanisms, but actually increase the success (or fitness, if you like) of the societies they dominate. So this (don't leave an infected area) is an excellent meme in Dawkins' original sense.

This is true for many of the writings in the old testament religions as well. Sensible advice for a different time and society.

Religion (like philosophy and superstition) is probably just the precursor to Science; a sapient species trying to make sense of their world and consciousness, plugging the holes in their understanding with the means currently at their disposal.

Unless they're born with complete and accurate knowledge about everything in the universe, I think all intelligent life out there is going to have a "religion" at some point in their civilization.

> Religion (and philosophy and superstition) is probably just the precursor to science

This is first thing. The other is precursor of law and social norms. It is hard to explain to people, that they shouldn't steal, because "it's wrong" and it hurts society. It's easier, when you tell them they will burn in hell for that.

It's actually easier (and more intuitive) to explain it in terms of reciprocity. We have an innate understanding of it.

Our innate understanding of reciprocity is severely limited by our social identity though; it's much easier to empathize with in-group members than with an out-group member. To reciprocate with an out-group member requires considerable training.

So I think the GP is correct, once a society encompasses multiple distinct tribes, it is easier to "guide" people with (threats of) in-group punishment than with out-group empathy.

Not true at all. An out group hits me, innately I want to hit back. An out group shows me empathy innately I show it back. You would have to learn otherwise.

The in-group out-group is some higher part of the brain that rationalised our values.

Yes I wrote Science as a catchall, including social sciences.

Though, I'm not sure if hive-mind intelligences or strictly hierarchical biologies (e.g. queens/workers/drones) would even need Law or guidance for social conduct, but they may still invent stopgap explanations (religions) on their way to understanding the weather and stars and such.

How is, "it's wrong" effectively different from, "you will burn in hell"?

Wouldn't it make way more sense to explain why it's wrong? It has nothing to do with hurting society, but another individual.

For you it's obvious, but for the medieval peasant - I don't think so.

But humans innately can have religious experiences(feeling higher being, lsd experiences, etc), and without that, how can you build a religion ?

But sure intelligent life would probably have some wrong stories/beliefs about the world at earlier stages. I wouldn't be surprised to see that in deep learning machines.

Like my parent post said, a religion can be any explanation (for how things work) that helps the species to better cope with their world, either physically or mentally.

The idea of deities need not be necessarily involved; there's major religions in our own world that do not place a focus on "higher beings."

> Religion (like philosophy and superstition)

One of these things is not like the others.

This book ("Think" by Simon Blackburn) is a wonderfully readable introduction to the subject if you haven't studied philosophy before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think:_A_Compelling_Introducti...

It's one of the books every smart person should read.

I didn't mean to "belittle" philosophy. I meant we speculate when we cannot know something for certain. Philosophy would arguably fall under that.

Philosophy is a science of science. It's original purpose is to define the foundations of knowledge and principles of building knowledge. At least that's how I perceive it.

All that blathering about meaning of life and whatnot that people often see as philosophy's main topic of exploration is, in fact, for most part an exercise in argumentation and exploration of logic.

As would Science, in fact. You learn this if you study philosophy.

> Religion (like philosophy and superstition) is probably just the precursor to Science

Or the universe was created and science is a way to explore the Creator by observing Creation.

Science was invented so that people could reach consensus about reality through dispassionate and rational procedures. These procedures are absolutely underpinned by induction (observable and reproducible results). Things that are not observable (spirits) or not reproducible (miracles) are logically outside the domain of scientific exploration.

To assume there is no supernatural because we've observed no supernatural phenomenon in the natural world is begging the question. In other words, to insist on the metaphysical claim that 'this reality is it', leaning only on Science, is to attempt to prove a negative.

So, I very much disagree with the description of 'Science' as a rational progression from metaphysical belief systems.

Anyway, all of that is a philosophical discourse, so I also disagree that philosophy is a 'precursor' to 'Science'. Early scientific inquiry was described as 'natural philosophy', after all.

Most of these concepts and discussions could be unique to humans to begin with, or a result of being human.

As I said in another post, an intelligent species with a true hive-mind or a strictly hierarchical queen/worker biology may have completely different ideas about these things; ideas which would be unrelatable to us if not incomprehensible.

For example they may not need morals and laws.

An species without biological genders may not produce lofty treatises on Love. Species that live for a very long time or are medically immortal, or inherit memories, may have radically different ideas about Creation and Death.

We can't know how universal our ideas are until we meet someone else.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518761 and marked it off-topic.

> Of note is how smallpox was used as a weapon: "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians, by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." — Jeffery Amherst

Someone should find those Europeans and punish them. Or at the very least make their descendants feel guilty forever.

From what I remember reading up on it a while ago (and I'm probably wrong) a large part of the death was not intentional and was probably inevitable (like wise even for the black plague but a lesser degree.. it could have been avoided).

Compare this to the Nazis or various other genocides which were highly avoidable and huge faults of humanity.

It doesn't matter Europeans destroyed indigenous cultures in America through the spread of disease. We should make sure that every child in the US knows this. We should also make sure that we remind people of it whenever people mention other tragedies like the Black Death. We're very bad people. We need to remember.

It is and was called imperialism and almost every nation and civilization has done it (not that it excuses it).

Even optimistic Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek future it continues on and is a topic (the prime directive).

What do you think happened to the neanderthals?

Survival instincts are just inherently nasty but we as humans should rise above these tendencies since we have the cognitive ability to do so.

I mean for god sake look how we treat and what we do to the animals that we eat. A hundred years from now it might be seen as a serious moral slip on our part. We might all be very bad people.

> Survival instincts are just inherently nasty but we as humans should rise above these tendencies since we have the cognitive ability to do so.

Human nature is what it is. It has not changed in millennia, it's only sublimated by culture. Football is a substitute for war. Social media and Reality TV are a substitute for the 'gossip fence.' Gene Roddenberry had a transparently unrealistic model of humanity, and thank goodness. For many people it would boring beyond belief.

The neanderthal genocid theory is a bit outdated. Actually they died because of an erruption below the phlegraean fields. Every human born in an area where neanderthals used to live is a far descendant of ybrids. Until today our dna is made of up to two percent of their dna. The mutations resulting in a low melanin levels and blue eyes are thought to be most likely inherited by neanderthals.

A recent YC thread had an alternative explanation: the male offspring of S/N interbreeding may have been sterile. The 2% of DNA you mention is all inherited through the female line.

you mean those folks who went away from europe/were kicked out for various reasons, and came to america and afterwards did those things? i agree with your outrage since it shows pure evil, but logically most descendants of those people should be US citizens for many generations.

> We're very bad people. We need to remember.

I understand the ancestral affinity you may feel to the perpetrators, but we aren't bad people because our ancestors made terrible decisions.

> but we aren't bad people because our ancestors made terrible decisions

True; we're bad people because we're still making terrible decisions today, but you can't run an empire without breaking a few countries.

> you can't run an empire without breaking a few countries.

I don't know. It hasn't been tried before.

Sounds like an awesome way to spend your life, enjoy!

By now "those european" descendants probably have a long family history in the United States...

> Someone should find those Europeans and punish them.

In the case of "Lord Jeff" he instead has a prestigious small college as well as a largish university named after him.

Very droll I'm sure, but 'tis but a small price to pay for your stolen inheritance.

Why? Most Americans are of European descent (perhaps distant). Regardless, Punishing people for the crimes of their ancestors is nonsense.

Hanging your head in shame is a useless gesture. Human beings have a dark side when external threat, political or territorial ambitions get involved.

The implication to this hand-wringing that appears here and in literature is that "we" as a human race is somehow "better" or "reformed" now vs. then. That's absolutely false, and given the right situation, we always demonstrate that we're capable of any form of depravity that you can imagine (and many that you probably cannot imagine).

Learning from past mistakes is much more important than feeling guilt or any other emotional response...

Please don't post glib and harsh comments about terrible things. It harms discussion. Others get defensive (if they disagree) or aggressive (if they agree). Both states lead away from thoughtful conversation, the thing we're hoping for here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519194 and marked it off-topic.

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