The history of humanity is riddled with terrible epidemics, which claimed a large number of victims and literally decimated the population. Humanity has not yet been able to enjoy the enormous advances in science and medicine, and the discovery of vaccines – which have saved an enormous number of lives in recent centuries – was still a long way off.
One of the pandemics of the past the plague of Justinian in the 6th century AD, a plague that, according to the Byzantine historian Procopius, “exterminated almost all of humanity.” It is estimated that the bubonic plague killed tens of millions of people in the Mediterranean region and the population of the Roman Empire was halved. Other epidemics that occurred in later centuries, e.g. B. those of the 14th century, decimated the European population even more.
The earliest attested pandemics in human history are those that occurred during the Roman Empire: including the Antonine Plague (ca. 165 to 180 AD), the Plague of Cyprian (ca. 251 to 266 AD) and the first pandemic of bubonic plague (ca. 541 to 766 AD), known as the Plague of Justinian.
Pandemics in the Roman Empire and climate change
One just in Science Advances published study brings several pandemics that occurred in the Roman Empire between 200 and 600 ADrelated to the climate change at the time. Scientists found that periods of cold, dry weather on the Italian peninsula coincided with severe epidemics in the empire. This, the magazine reports Scientific Americanmay suggest that climate change caused stress in Roman society by facilitating the spread of such pandemics.
Researchers reconstructed the temperature and precipitation levels from around 200 BC. to 600 AD from a marine sediment archive in southern Italy and documented phases of instability and cooling from around 100 AD, but especially after around 130 AD.
Severe cold periods between about 160 and 180 AD, between about 245 and 275 AD, and after about 530 AD are associated with pandemic diseases, suggesting that climatic stress is linked to social and biological variables interact, according to the authors.
The importance of the dynamics between environment and disease in past civilizations underlines this Need for health to be included in climate change risk assessmentthe researchers add.
Climate cooling was not the direct cause of pandemics
Study co-author Kyle Harper argues in the journal Le Sciencethat Pandemics are not directly linked to a drop in temperature, i.e. a cooling of the climate at that time, were attributablebut possibly the result of disruptions (e.g. dwindling food supplies, spread of rats, mosquitoes and other pests) that these climatic changes caused in Roman society.
The cooling of the climate would not have directly caused the pandemicsbut it would have created destabilizing tensions in ecosystems and societies and opened gaps into which the pathogens responsible for these terrible epidemics could penetrate.
Source:
Karin AF Zonneveld et al. (2024): Climate change, society, and pandemic diseases in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1033
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