Author Topic: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?  (Read 1699 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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Daily Beast by Candida Moss 6/16/2019

A recent discovery in England has some claiming proof for one of the grand theories for the demise of one of history's greatest empires.

An international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has discovered the first direct genetic evidence of the Plague of Justinian in the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon site of Edix Hill, in southern Cambridgeshire. The Plague of Justinian is believed by many researchers to have been one of the primary causes of the fall of the Roman Empire but until this point it was unknown in the British Isles.  As such, these remains may give us new insight into the disease that helped to bring down one of the greatest empires history has ever seen and solve one of history’s greatest mysteries.

In the middle of the second century A.D. the Romans were the preeminent power in the world. The empire spread from northern Britain, in the west, to the Sahara, in the south. Five centuries later much of that empire had been eroded or collapsed. It had become, in the words of Kyle Harper, “a small Byzantine rump-state.” To be sure, Rome had suffered military losses including several devastating ‘sackings’ of Rome, but these alone cannot account for Rome’s demise. How did this transformation—which has sometimes been called the biggest setback in the history of human civilization—happen?

A spate of recently published academic and crossover trade books, most recently Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, have argued that climate change and environmental agents were the ultimate reason for the Fall of the Roman Empire. Two environmental factors are now cited as the main causes for the fall of Rome. The first is the already mentioned Justinian plague, a pandemic of bubonic plague that reached the Roman Empire around 541 and would sporadically reappear throughout the region for the next two centuries. The plague features prominently in several modern histories of the fall of empire is known to us from sixth century writers such as the Byzantine historian Procopius and the Syriac Church historian John of Ephesus. They describe an illness that caused fevers, swollen buboes, and hallucinations. DNA analysis of sixth century skeletal remains has revealed that the disease was bubonic plague. Harper has estimated that mortality rates during the first pandemic were as high as 50-60 percent of the total population of the Empire. The medievalist Lester Little, editor of Plague and the End of Antiquity, wrote that the plague helped “usher in the Middle Ages.”

The second is a cluster of environmental changes that includes the so-called Dust Veil event (or perhaps disaster, but it’s mainly known as “the Dust Veil Event”), which took place in 535-36 and was caused by volcanic eruptions, and was followed by the so-called “Late Antique Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling in the sixth and seventh centuries.  According to Procopius, “during [535-46 A.D.] a most dread portent took…the sun gave forth its light without brightness ... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.” Evidence from elsewhere around the globe suggests that something “big” happened in this period. A dense fog was seen in China and Europe. There was a drought in Peru; and snow fell during summer months in China. The Irish Annals also refer to crop failures.

Scientific analysis of tree rings by Mike Baillie, a scientist at the Queen’s University in Belfast, revealed that there was very little growth in Irish oaks in 536 (with a second drop in 542). Independent ice core analysis from Greenland and Antarctica uncovered substantial deposits of sulfates in 534 (give or take two years), which is suggestive of acidic dust in the atmosphere. These eruptions were followed, according to scientist Ulf Büntgen, by LALIA, a period of cooler temperatures across Europe that lasted from 536 to 660.

More: https://www.thedailybeast.com/do-these-skeletons-hold-the-secret-to-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire

Offline Elderberry

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #1 on: July 19, 2019, 05:09:37 pm »
Current Archaeology by Kathryn Krakowka 7/4/2019

https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/generating-the-genomes-of-ancient-plague.htm

Generating the genomes of ancient plague

Quote
New DNA research into the evolution and spread of the plague has shown that during the first documented pandemic (AD 541-750) there were several different strains of the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, affecting different parts of Europe during different waves of the disease. The project also identified the earliest evidence of plague in Britain.

An international team of researchers analysed more than 180 samples from 21 sites across Europe, including in France, Britain, Germany, and Spain. In Britain, 22 samples came from Edix Hill cemetery near Barrington in southern Cambridgeshire, which dates from AD 500-650.

More at link.

Offline rustynail

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #2 on: July 19, 2019, 05:15:16 pm »
And their lead water pipes and drinking cups?

Offline Elderberry

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #3 on: July 19, 2019, 05:53:31 pm »
And their lead water pipes and drinking cups?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/scienceshot-did-lead-poisoning-bring-down-ancient-rome
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While the lead contamination was measureable, the team says the levels were unlikely high enough to be harmful, ruling out tap water as a major culprit in Rome's demise.

Offline Absalom

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #4 on: July 19, 2019, 07:43:25 pm »
Skeleton malarkey for the congenitally goofy!!!
The Roman Empire declined and fell because of the
demise and absence of leadership in Rome; as Gibbon
asserted and detailed in his monumental History.

Offline truth_seeker

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #5 on: July 19, 2019, 08:35:12 pm »
Skeleton malarkey for the congenitally goofy!!!
The Roman Empire declined and fell because of the
demise and absence of leadership in Rome; as Gibbon
asserted and detailed in his monumental History.
Science not your thing?

"God must love the common man, he made so many of them.�  Abe Lincoln

Offline PeteS in CA

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #6 on: July 19, 2019, 11:19:10 pm »
Definitions and daffynitions ...

I think Rome's decline started some time in the late 3rd Century or so. The empire was an administrative nightmare, being so huge and communication being by foot and horse. The quality of leadership was declining. Diocletian tried to lessen the nightmare by spreading top-level power, but that worked poorly after he died (not that I'm sympathetic to that monster). The empire pretty much felled itself with internal strife. No doubt, a plague outbreak would have hurt pretty severely. BTW, Gibbon also, absurdly, blamed Christianity for Rome's decline. The history of the 3rd Century leading up to Diocletian gives the lie to that idea, as did Diocletian's persecution of Christians.
If, as anti-Covid-vaxxers claim, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/robert-f-kennedy-jr-said-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-deadliest-vaccine-ever-made-thats-not-true/ , https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2021/11/23/covid-shots-are-the-deadliest-vaccines-in-medical-history/ , The Vaccine is deadly, where in the US have Pfizer and Moderna hidden the millions of bodies of those who died of "vaccine injury"? Is reality a Big Pharma Shill?

Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.


Offline Joe Wooten

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #8 on: July 20, 2019, 01:32:25 am »
Definitions and daffynitions ...

I think Rome's decline started some time in the late 3rd Century or so. The empire was an administrative nightmare, being so huge and communication being by foot and horse. The quality of leadership was declining. Diocletian tried to lessen the nightmare by spreading top-level power, but that worked poorly after he died (not that I'm sympathetic to that monster). The empire pretty much felled itself with internal strife. No doubt, a plague outbreak would have hurt pretty severely. BTW, Gibbon also, absurdly, blamed Christianity for Rome's decline. The history of the 3rd Century leading up to Diocletian gives the lie to that idea, as did Diocletian's persecution of Christians.

The plague and little ice age killed off enough Western Romans that that part of the empire fell. The Eastern part got hit hard, but it kept enough people to make it through, though they were so weak that a hundred years later they could not prevent the recently Islamicized Aarbs from overrunning the Levant and Egypt/North Africa. Lucky for them the Persians got hit by the same double whammy and they and the Byzantines ground each other down in the 6th and 7th centuries.

Offline Absalom

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #9 on: July 20, 2019, 04:14:04 am »
Science not your thing?
----------------------------------
Er.......not the science that Mad Magazine used to promote!!!

Offline Absalom

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Re: Do These Skeletons Hold the Secret to the Fall of the Roman Empire?
« Reply #10 on: July 20, 2019, 04:54:06 am »
Definitions and daffynitions ...

I think Rome's decline started some time in the late 3rd Century or so. The empire was an administrative nightmare, being so huge and communication being by foot and horse. The quality of leadership was declining. Diocletian tried to lessen the nightmare by spreading top-level power, but that worked poorly after he died (not that I'm sympathetic to that monster). The empire pretty much felled itself with internal strife. No doubt, a plague outbreak would have hurt pretty severely. BTW, Gibbon also, absurdly, blamed Christianity for Rome's decline. The history of the 3rd Century leading up to Diocletian gives the lie to that idea, as did Diocletian's persecution of Christians.
------------------------
All are entitled on any opinion, yet it would be refreshing if some opinions merged w/reality!
Rome, alongside Greece, created Western Civilization and for a direct and simple reason.
They fostered attitudes, behaviors, impulses and sentiments necessary to achieve and
advance their temperament and values; they very reason for their greatness.
When those traits waned, decline was inevitable.
The Christianity malarkey is sanctimonious horse manure!!!