Plague Helped Bring Down Roman Empire, Graveyard Suggests

Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor, 05/10/13

Plague may have helped finish off the Roman Empire, researchers now reveal.

Plague is a fatal disease so infamous that it has become synonymous with any dangerous, widespread contagion. It was linked to one of the first known examples of biological warfare, when Mongols catapulted plague victims into cities.

The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, has been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. One, the Great Plague, which lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed nearly two-thirds of Europe in the mid-1300s. Another, the Modern Plague, struck around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning in China in the mid-1800s and spreading to Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia. [In Photos: 14th-Century 'Black Death' Graveyard]

Although past studies confirmed this germ was linked with both of these catastrophes, much controversy existed as to whether it also caused the Justinianic Plague of the sixth to eighth centuries. This pandemic, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, killed more than 100 million people. Some historians have suggested it contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

To help solve this mystery, scientists investigated ancient DNA from the teeth of 19 different sixth-century skeletons from a medieval graveyard in Bavaria, Germany, of people who apparently succumbed to the Justinianic Plague.

They unambiguously found the plague bacterium Y. pestis there.

"It is always very exciting when we can find out the actual cause of the pestilences of the past," said researcher Barbara Bramanti, an archaeogeneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

"After such a long time — nearly 1,500 years, one is still able to detect the agent of plague by modern molecular methods," researcher Holger Scholz, a molecular microbiologist at the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Munich, Germany, told LiveScience.

The researchers said these findings confirm that the Justinianic Plague crossed the Alps, killing people in what is now Bavaria. Analysis of the DNA suggests that much like the later two pandemics of plague, this first pandemic originated in Asia, "even if historical records say that it arrived first in Africa before spreading to the Mediterranean basin and to Europe," Bramanti told LiveScience.

After the Modern Plague spread worldwide, it became entrenched in many rural areas, and the World Health Organization still reports thousands of cases of plague each year. However, doctors can now treat it with modern antibiotics.

The researchers now hope to reconstruct the whole genome sequence of the plague strain in these ancient teeth to learn more about the disease, Scholz said.

The scientists detailed their findings online May 2 in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Climate flux matched Europe's social rise and fall

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Ancient tree rings show links between climate change and major events in human history, like migrations, plagues and the rise and fall of empires, said a study this week in the journal Science.

Moist, balmy temperatures were seen during prosperous Medieval and Roman times, while droughts and cold snaps coincided with mass migrations.

To match the environmental record with the historical one, researchers looked at more than 7,200 tree fossils from the past 2,500 years, said lead author Ulf Buntgen of the Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape.

Oak rings are sensitive to changes in precipitation, and can show changes according to what was happening in the environment.

"The rise and fall of past civilizations have been associated with environmental change, mainly due to effects on water supply and agricultural productivity, human health and civil conflict," said the study.

"Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and Medieval prosperity," said the study which looked at tree samples from Europe and other parts of the world.

"Increased climate variability from (around) AD 250-600 coincided with the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period."

They could also glean signs about what was happening from changes in how many trees were being cut.

"Reduced tree harvesting (around) AD 250-400 coincides with the biggest CE (central Europe) historical crisis, the Migration Period, a time marked by lasting political turmoil, cultural change and socio-economic instability," it said.

"Increasing timber harvest for construction is represented by abundant felling parallel to socio-economic consolidation from the 6th to the 9th centuries."

The study said "unfavorable climate may have contributed to the spread of the second plague pandemic, the Black Death, which reduced the CE population after AD 1347 by 40-60 percent."

Researchers also noted that a sharp decline in North American temperatures around the same time saw an "abrupt desertion of former Greenland settlements."

Technological advances have made the modern human population less vulnerable to environmental changes to a certain extent, the study said.

However we are "certainly not immune to the predicted temperature and precipitation changes, especially considering that migration to more favorable habitats as an adaptive response will not be an option in an increasingly crowded world."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110114/sc_afp/climatescienceuseurope

China's wars, rebellions driven by climate: study

Marlowe Hood

PARIS (AFP) – Two millennia of foreign invasions and internal wars in China were driven more by cooling climate than by feudalism, class struggle or bad government, a bold study released Wednesday argued.

Food shortages severe enough to spark civil turmoil or force hordes of starving nomads to swoop down from the Mongolian steppes were consistently linked to long periods of colder weather, the study found.

In contrast, the Central Kingdom's periods of stability and prosperity occurred during sustained warm spells, the researchers said.

Theories that weather-related calamities such as drought, floods and locust plagues steered the unravelling or creation of Chinese dynasties are not new.

But until now, no one had systematically scanned the long sweep of China's tumultuous history to see exactly how climate and Chinese society might be intertwined.

Chinese and European scientists led by Zhibin Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing decided to compare two sets of data over 1,900 years.

Digging into historical archives, they looked at the frequency of war, price hikes of rice, locust plagues, droughts and floods. For conflict, they distinguished between internal strife and external wars.

At the same time, they reconstructed climate patterns over the period under review.

"The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han (25-220), Tang (618-907), Northern Song (960-1125), Southern Song (1127-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) are closely associated with low temperature or the rapid decline in temperature," they conclude.

A shortage of food would have weakened these dynasties, and pushed nomads in the north -- even more vulnerable to dips in temperature -- to invade their southern, Chinese-speaking neighbours, the authors argued.

A drop of 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in average annual air temperature can shorten the growing season for steppe grasses, which are critical for livestock, by up to 40 days.

"When the climate worsens beyond what the available technology and economic system can compensate for, people are forced to move or starve," they said.

The study found more droughts and floods during cold periods, but the factors that contributed most directly to wars and dynastic breakup were soaring rice prices and locust infestations.

The Roman and Mayan empires, they noted, also fell during cold periods.

Zhang and colleagues speculated that periodic temperature shifts roughly every 160 or 320 years were related to natural climate changes, namely fluctuations in solar activity and in Earth's orbit and axial spin.

The team said the findings demonstrate that climate change can lead to unrest and warfare.

"Historians commonly attribute dynastic transitions or cycles to the quality of government and class struggles," according to the paper, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"However, climatic fluctuation may be a significant factor interacting with social structures in affecting the rise and fall of cultures and dynasties."

But the historical evidence they found points to global cooling, not to global warming, as the culprit.

The scientists were cautious about making projections for the future. In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that man-made warming this century will lead to worse droughts, floods, harsh storms and sea level rise, with the potential to inflict hunger and misery on millions

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100713/sc_afp/chinasciencehistorywarclimate

Natural disasters doomed early civilization      

WASHINGTON – Nature turned against one of America's early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru. "This

maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them," anthropologist Mike Moseley of the

University of Florida said in a statement.

Moseley and colleagues were studying civilization of the Supe Valley along the Peruvian coast, which was established up to 5,800 years ago.

The people thrived on land adjacent to productive bays and estuaries, the researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Supe fished with nets, irrigated fruit orchards and grew cotton and a variety of vegetables, according to evidence found by research co-author Ruth Shady, a Peruvian archaeologist. They also built stone pyramids thousands of years before the better known Mayans.

But the Supe disappeared about 3,600 years ago and, after studying the region, the researchers think they know what happened.

They found that a massive earthquake, or series of quakes, struck the seismically active region, collapsing walls and floors and launching landslides from barren mountain ranges surrounding the valley.

In addition, layers of silt indicate massive flooding followed.

Then came El Nino, a periodic change in the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean, which brought heavy rains that damaged irrigation systems and washed debris into the streams and down to the ocean, where the sand and

silt settled into a large ridge, sealing off the previously rich coastal bays.

In the end, land where the Supe had lived for centuries became uninhabitable and their society collapsed, the researchers concluded.

The study was funded by the University of Florida and the Heyerdahl Exploration Fund, University of Maine.

On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

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Climate history may explain empires' fall

CHICAGO (Reuters) – An analysis of rings on a stalagmite from a cave near Jerusalem reveals a drier climate in the region at a time in history when the Roman and Byzantine empires were in decline, scientists reported on Thursday.

University of Wisconsin geologists analyzed the chemical composition of individual rings as small as one-hundredth of a millimeter across that formed the stalagmite growing up from the floor of the Soreq Cave near Jerusalem

between 200 B.C. and 1100 A.D..

Geologists John Valley and Ian Orland concluded the climate was drier in the eastern Mediterranean between 100 A.D. and 700 A.D., with steep drops in rainfall around 100 A.D. and 400 A.D. -- a period of waning Roman and

Byzantine power in the region.

"Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn't known, but it is an interesting correlation," Valley said in a statement.

The team is now applying the same geochemical technique to examine older samples from the cave from the time of the last glacial retreat roughly 19,000 years ago, to help understand how weather patterns respond to fast-warming temperatures.

Researchers from the Geological Survey of Israel and Hebrew University in Jerusalem helped with the study, which was to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research.

(Reporting by Andrew Stern)

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開欄文所報導的研究，從統計上指出「雨量」和「中國某幾個朝代興衰」間可能有相關性。但還不足以「證明」或「充分顯示」兩者間的確「相關」。

任何政治、經濟、和社會現象，是「多方互動」或「因緣和合」的結果。其他影響「政權興衰」的因素有政治領袖的能力和社會結構的穩定性等等。

如果在全面深入的分析後，確認了「雨量」和「中國朝代興衰」間的確有「相關性」，則它提供「唯物史觀」一個有力的旁證。

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