Myth of a European race, Myth of Vandals and Celts

[djoser-xyyman]

Myth of a European race, Myth of Vandals and Celts

I am not history buff and now I see that it is a good thing….not being a history buff and believing everything you read. Here a Euroepan is shedding light on the lies being spewed in our “history” books. As I said “ ancient genetics will make liars of historians”


BUSTING MYTHS OF ORIGIN by Ann Gibson

Summary
New studies show that there is no such thing as "pure" European—or anyone else. Almost all of us are the children of repeated ancient migrations, according to researchers who study ancient human origins. Indigenous Europeans, for example, descend from at least three major migrations in the past 15,000 years, including two from the Middle East. Those migrants swept across Europe, mingled with previous immigrants, and then remixed to create the peoples of today. Using revolutionary new methods to analyze DNA and the isotopes found in bones and teeth, scientists are exposing the tangled roots of peoples around the world, as varied as Germans, ancient Philistines, and Kashmiris. Few of us are actually the direct descendants of the ancient skeletons found in our backyards or historic homelands. Only a handful of groups today, such as Australian Aborigines, have deep bloodlines unaffected by mixing with immigrants.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LacD_JOI04&feature=youtu.be

--
Wind back the clock more than a thousand years—a
trivial slice of time compared with the 200,000 years or so
since our species emerged— and stories of exclusive heritage
or territory crumble. “Basically, everybody’s myth is wrong, even the indigenous groups’,” says population geneticist
David Reich of Harvard University.


After Tacitus’s account resurfaced in the 15th century, German nationalists resurrected
the myth of Arminius, who is often depicted as a blond, muscular young chieftain
and known as Hermann. Hailed as the first “German” hero, he was said to have united the Germanic tribes and driven the Romans
from their territory. That was considered the start of a period when fearsome Germanic
tribes such as the Vandals swept around Europe, wresting territory from Romans
and others.

In the 20th century, the Nazis added their own dark spin to that origin story, citing
Arminius as part of an ancient pedigree of a “master race” from Germany and northern
Europe that they called Aryans. They used their view of prehistory and archaeology to
justify claims to the tribes’ ancient homelands in Poland and Austria.
Scholars agree that there was indeed a real battle that sent shock waves through the Roman
Empire, which then stretched from the island of Britain to Egypt. But much of the
rest of Arminius’s story is myth: The Romans persisted deep in Germania until at least the
third century C.E., as shown by the recent discovery of a third-century Roman battlefield
in Harzhorn, Germany. And Arminius by no means united the more than 50 Germanic
tribes of the time. He persuaded five tribes to join him in battle, but******** members of
his own tribe soon killed him******. Moreover, Arminius and his kin were not
pure “Aryan,” if that term means a person whose ancestors lived solely in what is now
Germany or Scandinavia. The Cherusci tribe, like all Europeans of their day and later, were
themselves composites, built from serial migrations
into the heart of Europe and then repeatedly remixed. “The whole concept of
an ethnic German … it’s ludicrous when you look at the longue durée [long time] scale,”
says archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

[djoser-xyyman]

That was just one of many episodes of migration and mixing. The first Europeans came from Africa via the Middle East and settled there about 43,000 years ago. But some of those pioneers,
such as a 40,000-year-old individual from Romania, have little connection to today’s Europeans, Reich says.

***Farther north, the Irish Book of Invasions, ****written by an anonymous author in the 11th century, recounts that the
“Sons of Mí l Espá ine … after many wanderings in Scythia and Egypt” eventually reached Spain and Ireland, creating a
modern Irish people distinct from the British—and linked to the Spanish. That telling resonates with a later yarn about
ships from the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the shores of Ireland and the Scottish Orkney Islands in 1588, Bradley says: “Good-looking, dark-haired
Spaniards washed ashore” and had children with Gaelic and Orkney Islands women, creating a strain of Black Irish with dark hair, eyes, and skin.

Although it’s a great story, Bradley says, it “just didn’t happen.” In two studies, researchers
have found only “a very small ancient Spanish contribution” to British and Irish
DNA, says human geneticist Walter Bodmer of the University of Oxford in the United
Kingdom, co-leader of a landmark 2015 study of British genetics.



The Irish also cherish another origin story, of the Celtic roots they are said to
share with the Scots and Welsh. In the Celtic Revival of the 19th and 20th centuries,
writers such as William Butler Yeats drew from stories in the Book of Invasions and
medieval texts. Those writings described a migration of Gaels, or groups of Celts from the mainland who clung to their identity in
the face of later waves of Roman, Germanic, and Nordic peoples.

[djoser-xyyman]

*****But try as they might, *****researchers so far haven’t found anyone, living or dead, with a
distinct Celtic genome. The ancient Celts got their name from Greeks who used “Celt” as
a label for barbarian outsiders—the diverse Celtic-speaking tribes who, starting in the
late Bronze Age, occupied territory from Portugal to Turkey. “It’s a hard question who the
Celts are,” says population geneticist Stephan Schiffels of the Max Planck Institute for the
Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Bodmer’s team traced the ancestry of
2039 people whose families have lived in the same parts of Scotland, Northern Ireland,
and Wales since the 19th century. These people form at least nine genetic and geographic
clusters, showing that after their ancestors arrived in those regions, they put down roots
and married their neighbors. But the clusters themselves are of diverse origin, with close
ties to people now in Germany, Belgium, and France. “‘Celtic’ is a cultural definition,”
Bodmer says. “It has nothing to do with hordes of people coming from somewhere
else and replacing people.”


“Ethnic groups in the past and present create an ‘imagined past’ of the longtime and ‘pure’ origins of their group,”
Maeir says. But that created past often has “little true relation to the historical processes” that actually created the group, he says.

----

[djoser-xyyman]

I am curious what is the “Book of Invasions and Medieval Text” written by an anonymous. And why would Europeans put so much faith in it?

[kel]

Even hen they admit the "truth"they still lie. It looks like the admissions exist to prevent people looking into even bigger lies. In intelligence circles, it is called a 'limited hangout'.

"The first Europeans came from Africa via the Middle East and settled there about 43,000 years ago."

This is a LIE or distortion. The First Euros came from Africa via Gibralter and island hopping from North Africa across the Mediterranean .....much like the refugees are doing today.

What is the big lie ?? that perhaps like Mike says, until relatively recently the indigenous peoples "Celts" et al of Europe were Black and were wiped out, expelled, amalgamated by the invading Whites.

[djoser-xyyman]

I like you Kel. You are on point.

"Even hen they admit the "truth"they still lie.

Reading the piece they admit their lies and replace it with more lie. A really fugked up people! Fascinating. They have the Universe in disorder. They just can't come clean!

I never knew there was a word for it...."'limited hangout'.
"

[kel]

"A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti, "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

[mindovermatter]

Well it seems that Whites are FINALLY FINALLY coming OUT AND ADMITTING THAT I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG! This should have been obvious since I PROVIDED CLEAR EVIDENCE THAT CLIMATIC ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS LIKE THE LITTLE ICE AGE AND THE LITTLE ICE AGE OF ANTIQUITY, combined with the factors of incessant wars and civil wars (e.g between non-whites and whites in Europe), massive droughts caused by said ecological shifts, steppe movements and migrations (whites) from Central Asia and Siberia and from North-East Europe and barbarian invasions (by said whites such as Goths, Scythians etc) THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRETY OF EUROPE, plague and epidemic outbreaks like the BLACK DEATH WHICH CHANGED THE ENTIRE GENETIC STRUCTURE OR EUROPE TO THAT OF TODAY and Justinian's plague, demographic decline periods and declining civilizations due to corruption and intrigue and lack of continuous birth rates (mulatto/colored Greco-Roman civs), caused Europe's populations TO SWITCH FROM THE ORIGINAL BLACK/BROWN POPULATION OF OLD EUROPE (a population which Benjamin Franklin REFERENCED EXPLICITLY IN HIS WRITINGS) to that of MODERN EUROPE FULL OF WHITES AND OFF-WHITES!

Here is the thread where I detail this:

www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=010837;p=1


NOW WHITES ARE FINALLY COMING OUT AND ADMITTING THAT I WAS RIGHT IN THAT THREAD, AND THOSE OF YOU DISAGREED WITH ME WERE WRONG ALL ALONG! SEE HERE FOR PROOF!

www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/30/16568716/six-ways-climate-change-disease-toppled-roman-empire

6 ways climate change and disease helped topple the Roman Empire



Americans have always loved to compare themselves to the ancient Romans. Our political language and ideology are suffused with Latin influences like “capitol,” “forum,” and “senate”; the neoclassical style is our federal architecture; our very model of a constitutional republic is deeply indebted to Rome’s example.

Naturally, the example of a great, seemingly indomitable power fading into ruin haunts the American imagination. The Roman Empire at its height stretched from the edges of Scotland to the sands of the Sahara, from the shores of the Atlantic to the hills of Syria. Economically, the Romans engineered one of the greatest “golden ages” of any preindustrial society. The empire was generous in granting Roman citizenship throughout its vast territory, and by making subjects into citizens, the empire helped to unleash the cultural potential of the provinces under Roman sway.

By the time of the first emperor Augustus (who ruled from 27 BC to AD 14), the Romans controlled virtually the entire Mediterranean shoreline, and they kept it for nearly half a millennium.

The empire reached its height in the middle of the second century. Although the great English chronicler of Rome’s fall, Edward Gibbon, described a long process of decline followed by piecemeal disintegration, today’s historians are skeptical of the idea of a slow decline. Rather, fiscal, social, and geopolitical challenges mounted and then suddenly overwhelmed the Romans.

The fall came in two parts: German kingdoms replaced Roman rule in the West in the fifth century, then Arab conquerors seized the prize parts of the Eastern empire in the middle of the seventh century. Of course, the underlying causes have always been hotly debated. Did the Romans tax too little or too much? Was there class conflict underneath the political regime?

But in recent years historians have also started to revisit the fall of the Roman Empire with an openness to the importance of environmental factors, including climate change and pandemic disease. Thanks to amazing new evidence from the natural sciences, we can now see that, while the human factors remain integral, they are sometimes just the surface effects of the deeper and more powerful forces of nature.

The story of Rome, ultimately, reminds us of the fragility of human societies in the face of nature and our precarious dependence on the fickle planet that is our home.

Here are six ways that the environment — physical and biological — brought down the mighty empire.
The Romans were enormously lucky when it came to climate. Then they got less lucky.

Today, greenhouse gas emissions are altering the earth’s climate at an alarming pace, but climate change is nothing new. Slight variations in the tilt, spin, and orbit of the earth change the amount and distribution of solar energy reaching its surface; the sun itself emits variable amounts of radiation; volcanoes spew ash that hangs in the upper atmosphere and reflects heat back into space. Historians have only recently begun to take into account the gold rush of new data about the climate in the classical world.



It turns out the Romans were lucky. The centuries during which the empire was built and flourished are known even to climate scientists as the “Roman Climate Optimum.” From circa 200 BC to AD 150, it was warm, wet, and stable across much of the territory the Romans conquered. In an agricultural economy, these conditions were a major boost to GDP. The population swelled yet still there was enough food to feed everyone.

But from the middle of the second century, the climate became less reliable. The all-important annual Nile flood became erratic. Droughts and severe cold spells became more common. The Climate Optimum became much less optimal.

The lesson to be drawn is not, of course, that we shouldn't worry about man-made climate change today, which threatens to be more severe than what the Romans experienced. To the contrary, it shows just how sensitive human societies can be to such change — now amplified in speed and scope by human activity.

Globalization brought great wealth — and disease

In the AD 160s, at the apex of Roman dominance, the empire fell victim to one of history’s first recorded pandemics — an event known as the “Antonine Plague” (after the family name of the ruling dynasty). It was unprecedented in magnitude. Death tolls are hard to come by, but the outbreak took the life of something like 7 or 8 eight million victims. By comparison, the worst defeat in Roman military history claimed around 20,000 lives.

Its cause remains debated, but the likeliest candidate is the smallpox virus or an ancestor of smallpox (a virus that may have evolved not long before this outbreak, most likely in Africa). The Romans traded throughout the Indian Ocean world, across the Red and Persian Seas; their ships reached India and the East African coast.

This trading network carried spices and precious metals and slaves — and germs. Unleashed inside the densely settled and interconnected Roman Empire, the new pathogen was devastating. The Roman Empire survived the Antonine Plague, but the social order was unsettled. From that moment onward, maintaining Rome’s dominance along the frontiers became a greater challenge.
A second pandemic pushes social institutions past the breaking point

The empire rebounded from the Antonine Plague behind the vigorous rule of an African-Syrian dynasty known as the Severans. But in the AD 240s, a ferocious drought struck. Close on its heels, another pandemic, known as the Plague of Cyprian, broke out. The biological agent of this pestilence remains a mystery (though genomic evidence may yet turn up), but its impact is clear. It wasted the population from one end of the empire to the other.

The resulting demographic crisis triggered a total meltdown of the entire imperial system, known as the “crisis of the third century.” Enemies poured across every border, piercing deep into parts of the empire which had not seen war for centuries. One emperor after another seized the throne.

The crisis is considered the “first fall” of the Roman Empire. The empire did reemerge, but with at least two profound changes. First, the empire was henceforth ruled by a different kind of emperor: A cadre of military officers from the provinces along the Danube seized control from the old, wealthy, Mediterranean aristocracy.

Second, the plague led to a crackdown on Christians that backfired mightily. At first, the Roman authorities blamed the pestilence on the Christian religious minority, and they set about trying to extirpate it. The church not only withstood the violent attacks but campaigned to care for the sick and bury the dead amid the pestilence — earning respect. Christianity grew more rapidly than ever in the aftermath of this trial. Climate change prodded the Huns to move, setting up a chain reaction

The Roman Empire in the fourth century, led now by Christian emperors, enjoyed a kind of second golden age. But it was not destined to last. In the last decades of the fourth century and the first decades of the fifth century, the empire suffered a series of military defeats unlike anything in its history — at the hands of the Goths. But the Goths, in turn, were prodded to move against the Romans because of an incursion into Europe of Huns, from central Asia.


Evidence from tree rings has helped historians study the paleoclimate

New paleoclimate evidence helps to explain why the Huns suddenly moved West. The Huns were nomads, native to the great belt of steppe that stretches from Hungary to Mongolia, an arid zone that depends on westerly mid-latitude storm tracks for rain.

Tree rings suggest that a megadrought in the middle of the fourth century might have made these nomads desperate for greener pastures. As they migrated West, they terrified the highly developed kingdoms, such as those of the Goths, that had long existed along Rome’s frontier. Partly because of this climate-caused upheaval, the Goths challenged Rome’s frontiers as never before. Rome’s Western territories ended up being carved up and reconfigured as Germanic kingdoms.
The Late Antique Little Ice Age

We rightly fear climate change in the form of global warming, but in the later Roman Empire, the greater danger was sudden sharp cooling. While the Western half of the empire fell, the Eastern, Greek half of the empire, now centered on New Rome, a.k.a. Constantinople, thrived.

In fact, during the reign of Justinian (who ruled from 527 to 65), the Roman Empire found new glory. In the first part of his reign, Justinian codified all of Roman law, went on the grandest building spree in Christian history (including erecting the Hagia Sophia), and took back Roman Africa and Italy.


A painting (circa 1774 to 1776) depicting Vesuvius erupting, by Thomas Wright. Volcanic eruptions in the 530s and 540s nearly blotted out the sun.

But then came perhaps the worst environmental catastrophe yet: the dual blow of a little ice age and yet another pandemic. In the 530s and 540s, volcanic eruptions rocked the globe. We have long known that in the year 536 there was no summer; for about 15 months, the sun seemed to shine only dimly, unnerving people worldwide. In recent years, careful work on tree rings and polar ice cores has clarified what happened.

First, in AD 536, there was a massive eruption in the Northern Hemisphere. Second, in AD 539/40, a tropical volcano erupted. The result was not just a year of darkness but truly staggering global cooling: The decade 536 to 545 was the coldest decade of the last 2000 years, with average summer temperatures in Europe falling by up to 2.5 degrees Celsius. And this was no passing phenomenon. For a century and a half, colder temperatures prevailed across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
The first black death

Just as the climate started to turn colder, the plague appeared on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean — in AD 541. This was true bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the agent of the more famous medieval Black Death.

Thanks to remarkable analysis of its genome, the history of this bacterium is now well understood. The plague is at root a disease of rodents, and had been endemic among social burrowing rodents in central Asia. It probably traveled to Rome across the trading networks that carried silks from China to the Mediterranean. The plague first spread from one rodent species to another, carried by fleas — ultimately infecting black rats, which live in close quarters with humans. Once the bacterium reached the rats of the Roman Empire, it was mayhem.

This precursor to the more famous European “Black Death” of the middle ages may have carried off half of the entire population of the Roman Empire. The immediate (and insuperable) problem was disposing of the corpses; the longer-range problem was managing an empire with a severely weakened tax base and a serious manpower shortage — including in the army.


Yersina pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague.

What’s more, the first pandemic inspired a wave of apocalyptic fervor. The pandemic not only wrecked Justinian’s dream of restoring Roman glory; it triggered a spiral of dissolution and state failure that stretched over the next century. One insidious aspect of plague is that it does not vanish after its initial work. It became permanently established in rodent colonies inside the Roman Empire and broke out repeatedly, every 10 to 20 years, unleashing new destruction each time. This helped push the Romans past the breaking point. By the middle of the seventh century, very little remained of the “eternal empire.”

AND:

www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-fall-rome-180967591/

How Climate Change and Plague Helped Bring Down the Roman Empire
We can learn crucial lessons by examining the natural forces that shaped Rome’s rise and fall



At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral lessons, it can deepen our sense of what it means to be human and how fragile our societies are.

In the middle of the second century, the Romans controlled a huge, geographically diverse part of the globe, from northern Britain to the edges of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. The generally prosperous population peaked at 75 million. Eventually, all free inhabitants of the empire came to enjoy the rights of Roman citizenship. Little wonder that the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon judged this age the ‘most happy’ in the history of our species—yet today we are more likely to see the advance of Roman civilization as unwittingly planting the seeds of its own demise.

Five centuries later, the Roman empire was a small Byzantine rump-state controlled from Constantinople, its near-eastern provinces lost to Islamic invasions, its western lands covered by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms. Trade receded, cities shrank and technological advance halted. Despite the cultural vitality and spiritual legacy of these centuries, this period was marked by a declining population, political fragmentation and lower levels of material complexity. When the historian Ian Morris at Stanford University created a universal social-development index, the fall of Rome emerged as the greatest setback in the history of human civilization.

Explanations for a phenomenon of this magnitude abound: in 1984, the German classicist Alexander Demandt cataloged more than 200 hypotheses. Most scholars have looked to the internal political dynamics of the imperial system or the shifting geopolitical context of an empire whose neighbours gradually caught up in the sophistication of their military and political technologies. But new evidence has started to unveil the crucial role played by changes in the natural environment. The paradoxes of social development, and the inherent unpredictability of nature, worked in concert to bring about Rome’s demise.

Climate change did not begin with the exhaust fumes of industrialization, but has been a permanent feature of human existence. Orbital mechanics (small variations in the tilt, spin and eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit) and solar cycles alter the amount and distribution of energy received from the Sun. And volcanic eruptions spew reflective sulphates into the atmosphere, sometimes with long-reaching effects. Modern, anthropogenic climate change is so perilous because it is happening quickly and in conjunction with so many other irreversible changes in the Earth’s biosphere. But climate change per se is nothing new.

The need to understand the natural context of modern climate change has been an unmitigated boon for historians. Earth scientists have scoured the planet for paleoclimate proxies, natural archives of the past environment. The effort to put climate change in the foreground of Roman history is motivated both by troves of new data and a heightened sensitivity to the importance of the physical environment.

It turns out that climate had a major role in the rise and fall of Roman civilization. The empire-builders benefitted from impeccable timing: the characteristic warm, wet and stable weather was conducive to economic productivity in an agrarian society. The benefits of economic growth supported the political and social bargains by which the Roman empire controlled its vast territory. The favorable climate, in ways subtle and profound, was baked into the empire’s innermost structure.

The end of this lucky climate regime did not immediately, or in any simple deterministic sense, spell the doom of Rome. Rather, a less favorable climate undermined its power just when the empire was imperilled by more dangerous enemies—Germans, Persians—from without. Climate instability peaked in the sixth century, during the reign of Justinian. Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age,’ when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years.

This phase of climate deterioration had decisive effects in Rome’s unravelling. It was also intimately linked to a catastrophe of even greater moment: the outbreak of the first pandemic of bubonic plague.

Disruptions in the biological environment were even more consequential to Rome’s destiny. For all the empire’s precocious advances, life expectancies ranged in the mid-20s, with infectious diseases the leading cause of death. But the array of diseases that preyed upon Romans was not static and, here too, new sensibilities and technologies are radically changing the way we understand the dynamics of evolutionary history—both for our own species, and for our microbial allies and adversaries.

The highly urbanized, highly interconnected Roman empire was a boon to its microbial inhabitants. Humble gastro-enteric diseases such as Shigellosis and paratyphoid fevers spread via contamination of food and water, and flourished in densely packed cities. Where swamps were drained and highways laid, the potential of malaria was unlocked in its worst form—Plasmodium falciparumva deadly mosquito-borne protozoon. The Romans also connected societies by land and by sea as never before, with the unintended consequence that germs moved as never before, too. Slow killers such as tuberculosis and leprosy enjoyed a heyday in the web of interconnected cities fostered by Roman development.

However, the decisive factor in Rome’s biological history was the arrival of new germs capable of causing pandemic events. The empire was rocked by three such intercontinental disease events. The Antonine plague coincided with the end of the optimal climate regime, and was probably the global debut of the smallpox virus. The empire recovered, but never regained its previous commanding dominance. Then, in the mid-third century, a mysterious affliction of unknown origin called the Plague of Cyprian sent the empire into a tailspin.

Though it rebounded, the empire was profoundly altered—with a new kind of emperor, a new kind of money, a new kind of society, and soon a new religion known as Christianity. Most dramatically, in the sixth century a resurgent empire led by Justinian faced a pandemic of bubonic plague, a prelude to the medieval Black Death. The toll was unfathomable; maybe half the population was felled.

The plague of Justinian is a case study in the extraordinarily complex relationship between human and natural systems. The culprit, the Yersinia pestis bacterium, is not a particularly ancient nemesis. Evolving just 4,000 years ago, almost certainly in central Asia, it was an evolutionary newborn when it caused the first plague pandemic. The disease is permanently present in colonies of social, burrowing rodents such as marmots or gerbils. However, the historic plague pandemics were colossal accidents, spillover events involving at least five different species: the bacterium, the reservoir rodent, the amplification host (the black rat, which lives close to humans), the fleas that spread the germ and the people caught in the crossfire.

Genetic evidence suggests that the strain of Yersinia pestis that generated the plague of Justinian originated somewhere near western China. It first appeared on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and, in all likelihood, was smuggled in along the southern, seaborne trading networks that carried silk and spices to Roman consumers. It was an accident of early globalization. Once the germ reached the seething colonies of commensal rodents, fattened on the empire’s giant stores of grain, the mortality was unstoppable.

The plague pandemic was an event of astonishing ecological complexity. It required purely chance conjunctions, especially if the initial outbreak beyond the reservoir rodents in central Asia was triggered by those massive volcanic eruptions in the years preceding it. It also involved the unintended consequences of the built human environment—such as the global trade networks that shuttled the germ onto Roman shores, or the proliferation of rats inside the empire.

The pandemic baffles our distinctions between structure and chance, pattern and contingency. Therein lies one of the lessons of Rome. Humans shape nature—above all, the ecological conditions within which evolution plays out. But nature remains blind to our intentions, and other organisms and ecosystems do not obey our rules. Climate change and disease evolution have been the wild cards of human history.

Our world now is very different from ancient Rome. We have public health, germ theory and antibiotic pharmaceuticals. We will not be as helpless as the Romans, if we are wise enough to recognize the grave threats looming around us, and to use the tools at our disposal to mitigate them. But the centrality of nature in Rome’s fall gives us reason to reconsider the power of the physical and biological environment to tilt the fortunes of human societies.

Perhaps we could come to see the Romans not so much as an ancient civilization, standing across an impassable divide from our modern age, but rather as the makers of our world today. They built a civilization where global networks, emerging infectious diseases and ecological instability were decisive forces in the fate of human societies. The Romans, too, thought they had the upper hand over the fickle and furious power of the natural environment.

History warns us: they were wrong.

^^^^I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU THAT I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG! And the EVIDENCE WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR GUYS EYES! But y'all disagreed with me and made yourself look foolish!

[kel]

The breakdown was pretty good (despite a number of lies and distortions), but the general gist is correct.

An interesting point is that there were TWO Black Plagues. One in 540s AD and the other in 1347 called the Black Death.

perhaps these pandemics are named BLACK buy modern Euro scholars for the fact that the pandemics essentially killed of Europe's indigenous and descended BLACK populations (??).

What is clear tho, is that under these conditions of complete chaos and collapse, modern Euros where usurpers and scavengers to then existing power structures... they filled the the vaccum.

[mindovermatter]

^^^That's a BRILLIANT TAKE on the plague naming, it's probably a subconscious Fruedian slip made by these "white" historians and academics and medieval writers. But yes IT'S OBVIOUS THAT BOTH THESE LARGE PANDEMICS CAUSED THE ORIGINAL BLACK/BROWN POPULATION CENTERS IN EUROPE TO COLLAPSE AND ALLOW WHITES FROM CENTRAL ASIA AND SIBERIA AND NORTHERN EUROPE TO USURP AND DISPLACE THE BLACK/BROWN POPULATIONS OF EUROPE AND THEIR POWER BASE! And THIS BLACK DEATH PLAGUE CAME FROM CENTRAL ASIA AND NORTHERN CHINA TO EUROPE, WHICH IMPLIES A MOVEMENT OF WHITE PEOPLE FROM THE EURASIAN STEPPES REGION TO EUROPE COINCIDING OF THE TRANSFER OF PLAGUE WITH THEM AS THEY MOVED! THESE PLAGUES SOMEHOW MYSTERIOUSLY DID NOT AFFECT THE WHITE "BARBARIAN" TRIBES BUT THE POPULATED CENTERS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE? THAT IMPLIES SOMETHING OR IS AN ADMISSION!

Notice how these articles admit that the plague and pandemic outbreaks SPREAD AMONG DENSELY POPULATED TOWNS AND CITIES WITH LOTS OF PEOPLE! Even to this day, a vast majority of black to non-white people CONGREGATE IN THE CITIES IN WESTERN COUNTRIES! Therefore since ITS OBVIOUS THAT BLACK/BROWN EUROPEANS CREATED AND POPULATED THE FIRST CITIES AND TOWNS OF EUROPE THAT SPRANG FROM THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE TO EUROPE FROM THE NEAR-WEST (WHICH WAS A VERY DARK SKINNED REGION IN ANCIENT TIMES TO EVEN TODAY), THEREFORE THE ORIGINAL BLACK/BROWN POPULATIONS OF EUROPE WERE THE FIRST IN LINE IN THE FACE OF PLAGUE ENDEMICS COMING TO EUROPE FROM OUTSIDE OF EUROPE SINCE THEY CREATED AND RAN EUROPE'S ORIGINAL GRECO-ROMAN CIVILIZATION AND PREVIOUS CIVILIZATIONS BEFORE IT UNLIKE WHITES WHOM LIVED A BACKWARDS NEOLITHIC NOMADIC EXISTENCE ALL THE WAY UP TO THE EARLY DARK AGES PERIOD!

Not only that, but PLAGUES FROM THE CENTRAL ASIAN AND SIBERIAN STEPPES HAVE BEEN OCCURRING SINCE THE NEOLITHIC IN EUROPE! INFACT A BRONZE AGE REMNANT OF A LARGE PLAGUE FROM THE CENTRAL ASIAN AND SIBERIAN STEPPES COINCIDING WITH THE MOVEMENT OF WHITE EURASIAN/INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES COMING INTO EUROPE FROM SAID STEPPES REGION, HAS BEEN FOUND RECENTLY BY SCIENTISTS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN ANCIENT REMAINS IN EUROPE! So the "mulatto-izing" of Europe has been occurring in different percentages, bit by bit across the ancient period since the days of the Yamna steppe herders coming into Europe!

[kel]

Mind,

You highlight an excellent point. It is already known by disease specialists that disease outbreaks and contagions tend to accompany immigration and population movements. Why ?? because as people move they and their animals bring their vectors with them and introduce them to people and fauna who have never had a chance to build up a resistance. Think: The Spanish coming to the New World.

-Or the Africans and Middle Easterners entering Europe today.
www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10676/germany-migrants-infectious

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-191209/Migrants-blamed-diseases.html

Therefore, it is likely that it was white migration in the first place that brought the plagues that wiped out the Black population centers. This occurred when English settlers encountered the Indians in the mainland Noth America as well.

The history books never mention this - the barbarians probably brought the plagues. ! The official story is usually that an outbreak occurred somewhere in the East and was brought by rats or trade.(once again....more lies).

[mindovermatter]

^^^The official story is full of holes and lies and outright idiocracy that it's hard to fathom how so many people can accept it!

Here is what I don't get about these plague endemics, the explanation given is that they were brought in by rats and mice and certain "nomadic" groups in trading centers, moving along well known transportation routes in the old world. Now given that plague endemics have been occurring SINCE the Neolithic/Bronze age in Europe repeatedly, that means that mice and rats and animals and peoples obviously played a role in this as they tell us about this involving the black death.

However how come the black death, A MAJOR PLAGUE THAT CHANGED THE ENTIRE GENETIC STRUCTURE OF THE POPULATION OF EUROPE, suddenly just appeared out of nowhere AT A VERY LATE TIME PERIOD, if rats and animals and nomads were the culprit? Because PLAGUES AND PANDEMICS HAVE BEEN OCCURRING IN EUROPE SINCE THE NEOLITHIC VIA RATS AND NOMADS SINCE THE NEOLITHIC, at least according to what recently has been reported. So if the black death originated from the eurasian steppes, HOW COME IT APPEARED SO LATE SINCE EUROPE WAS WELL INTER-CONNECTED WITH THE STEPPES REGION AND IT'S PEOPLES SINCE THE LATE NEOLITHIC, BRONZE/IRON AGES AND THE ANCIENT TIME PERIOD?

The rats and nomads explanation doesn't make sense, because if that was the case then THE MEDIEVAL/CLASSICAL PERIOD BLACK DEATH WOULD HAVE OCCURRED BEFORE AND MUCH EARLIER THEN THE TIME PERIOD IT OCCURRED IN, WHICH WAS A VERY LATE PERIOD IN EUROPE'S REGIONAL HISTORY VIS A VIS THE ANCIENT/NEOLITHIC TIME PERIOD WHEN BLACK/BROWN POPULATIONS FIRST BEGAN SETTLING EUROPE!

No because THE BLACK DEATH APPEARS RIGHT AFTER, RIGHT AFTER THE FORMER BARBARIAN ENEMIES AND ANTAGONISTS OF THE GRECO-ROMAN CIVILIZATIONS, AND THE VERY SAME BARBARIANS THAT OVERRAN AND DEMOGRAPHICALLY SWAMPED THE FORMER ROMAN EMPIRE BY SHEER POPULATION NUMBERS AT THE START OF THE DARK AGES, STARTS ASSIMILATING INTO AND SETTLING THROUGHOUT THE TERRITORIES OF THE GRECO-ROMAN EMPIRE THROUGHOUT EUROPE! RIGHT AFTERWARDS!

What this means is that yes, just like the Spaniards and English settlers in the New world, the black death BOTH during the Byzantine era and during the later Middle ages, WAS CAUSED BY MOVEMENTS OF LARGE GROUPS OF BARBARIAN PEOPLES (White Goths, Vandals, Slavs etc etc) FROM NORTHERN EUROPE AND THE STEPPES REGION! And instead of the fake bullshit story of the Mongols spreading it, the LIKELY EXPLANATION IS THAT THESE BLACK DEATH BACTERIA WERE DORMANT AND ATTACHED TO THESE BARBARIAN GROUPS FROM THE VERY BEGINNING!

Because it's only AFTER these white barbarian groups start SPREADING throughout the Roman empire that large scale STEPPE plague outbreaks like the Black death suddenly appear OUT OF THE BLUE! NOT BEFORE! And rats and mice have been circulating throughout the Greco-Roman civilization since antiquity, SO YES THESE PLAGUES COINCIDED WITH A MOVEMENT OF LARGE POPULATIONS OF PEOPLE!

[kel]

amazing......the lies.

[mindovermatter]

So this is a huge find and admission, but is already confirmation on what others have been hammering and saying repeatedly over the last few years or so here and elsewhere about just who the original settlers of Europe were and the ACTUAL ORIGINAL POPULATIONS LOOKED LIKE!

www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/first-modern-britons-dark-black-skin-cheddar-man-dna-analysis-reveals#img-1

First modern Britons had 'dark to black' skin, Cheddar Man DNA analysis reveals

The genome of Cheddar Man, who lived 10,000 years ago, suggests that he had blue eyes, dark skin and dark curly hair



The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.

The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.


Combing human genome reveals roots of hair diversity


It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.

Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.”

Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed, saying the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change”.

The findings were revealed ahead of a Channel 4 documentary, which tracked the ancient DNA project at the Natural History Museum in London as well as creating a new forensic reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s head.


To perform the DNA analysis, museum scientists drilled a 2mm-diameter hole into the ancient skull to obtain a few milligrams of bone powder. From this, they were able to extract a full genome, which held clues about this ancient relative’s appearance and lifestyle.

The results pointed to a Middle Eastern origin for Cheddar Man, suggesting that his ancestors would have left Africa, moved into the Middle East and later headed west into Europe, before eventually crossing the ancient land bridge called Doggerland which connected Britain to continental Europe. Today, about 10% of white British ancestry can be linked to this ancient population.

The analysis also ruled out an ancestral link with individuals inhabiting Gough’s Cave 5,000 years earlier, who appear to have performed grisly cannibalistic rituals, including gnawing on human toes and fingers – possibly after boiling them – and drinking from polished skull cups.

Britain was periodically settled and then cleared during ice ages until the end of the last glacial period about 11,700 years ago, since when it has been continuously inhabited.

Until now, though, it hasn’t been clear whether each wave of migrants was seeded from the same population in mainland Europe; the latest results suggest this was not the case.

The team homed in on genes known to be linked to skin colour, hair colour and texture, and eye colour. For skin tone, there are a handful of genetic variants linked to reduced pigmentation, including some that are very widespread in European populations today. However, Cheddar Man had “ancestral” versions of all these genes, strongly suggesting he would have had “dark to black” skin tone, but combined with blue eyes.

Scientists believe that populations living in Europe became lighter-skinned over time because pale skin absorbs more sunlight, which is required to produce enough vitamin D. The latest findings suggest pale skin may have emerged later, possibly when the advent of farming meant people were obtaining less vitamin D though dietary sources like oily fish.

Cheddar Man would have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, making sharp blades from flints for butchering animals, using antlers to whittle harpoons for spear fishing and carving bows and arrows.

^^^This is a VERY VERY big admission article by these eurocentric researchers about just who the original ACTUAL populations and settlers of Europe were. This person had blue eyes, NOT BECAUSE OF ADAPTATION BUT AN UNNATURAL MUTATION CAUSED BY A GENETIC DEFECT CALLED OCULAR ALBINISM! BLUE EYES ARE RESULTED FROM A LACK OF MELANIN IN THE EYES! And this mutation arose because of a near-earth supernova that occurred 8,000 years ago called the Vela supernova, which showered Earth's surface with excess radiation and solar flares that led to the Sahara desert and the North American deserts forming and a large amount of freak "mutations" in plants and animals and even humans all over the planet!

Of course, because since this ancient person had dark skin and maybe have deep genetic ancestral ties to African and black/brown populations from the Middle East, these researchers just had to pull out the "savage cannibalistic" primitive backwards card in order to demean and paint an image that that the previous people were unevolved barbaric brutes that had nothing to do with modern White Euros, and that modern white Euro's are "evolved" from them, or that this man was a better evolution, and they are simply better because they "evolved" in a higher manner from original cannibalistic Europeans supposedly. These researchers deploy this false linear evolutionary paradigm in order to obfuscate the fact that they ARE NOT ACTUALLY NATIVE OR INDIGENOUS TO EUROPE! The fact that this article hints that there is a lack of connection between the earliest Europeans, this person in the article, and modern White Europeans all pin point to the fact that modern White Europeans ARE NOT THE ORIGINAL INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS OF EUROPE AND ARE NOT FROM THERE AT ALL!


The original populations of Europe were displaced and absorbed and eliminated due to a combination of multiple events and factors. These events and factors are:

1) Climatic shifts and ecological disasters like the little ice age and the little ice age of antiquity, which lead to widespread drought outbreaks and crop and agricultural production failures; this led to periods of disasters for population centers in ancient to early medieval Europe, population centers which were originally created by the original Black/Brown settlers of Europe from the Middle East and Africa. And just like how the majority of Black/brown populations in Western countries congregate in densely populated cities today, the cities/towns of ancient Europe and the Greco-Roman empires were also majority filled with Black/Brown Europeans AND NOT WHITE EUROPEANS! These population centers were severely affected to the point where it killed off loads of these original Europeans and caused all sorts of conflict that led to chaos and overall population reduction of these original Black/Brown Europeans overall in total numbers in the region.


2) Plague and disease/epidemic outbreaks such as the Black death and Justinian's plague and other such outbreaks that occurred since the late neolithic to the Greek Dark ages. This was likely caused by said climatic shifts, which further created population migrations and influx of White Indo-European/Turkic/Eurasian populations along with their animals/pest organisms, throughout Europe and from outside of Europe from Central Asia and Siberia and North-East/Northern Europe; which were uncultivated backwaters in ancient times without little to any major population centers/towns/cities.

Because the most densely populated towns/cities in ancient and early Medieval Europe were mostly for the majority, filled with the original Black/Brown settlers of Europe; these population centers were entities on the front line, and the locations the most severely impacted and hit by these plague/epidemic outbreaks BECAUSE THE MAJORITY BLACK/BROWN POPULATIONS OF EUROPE CONGREGATED IN THESE POPULATION CENTERS AND NOT THE WHITE INDO-EUROPEAN/TURKIC/EURASIAN ANCESTORS OF TODAY'S WHITE EUROPEANS, WHOM MOSTLY LIVED IN NORTHERN EUROPE, CENTRAL ASIA/SIBERIA DURING THE ANCIENT TIME PERIOD AND BEFORE! It's likely that a lot of these plague and epidemics WERE CARRIED BY WHITE EURASIAN/INDO-EUROPEAN TRIBAL GROUPS THROUGHOUT EUROPE, AS THEY WERE FORCED TO MASS MIGRATED THROUGHOUT EUROPE CAUSED BY SEVERE CLIMATIC DISASTERS AND ECOLOGICAL SHIFTS IN THEIR NATURAL HABITATS, AS THEY WERE NOMADIC NON-CIVILIZATION PEOPLE ORIGINALLY!


3) Wars/civil wars, which there is lots of records of, involving the earliest population centers and civilization of Europe (Greco-Roman etc); these incessant wars and civil wars likely occurred because of the climatic and ecological disasters that I mentioned. These wars involved multiple factions and populations from Africa to Asia to foreign white barbarian tribes from outside of Europe and Northern Europe. These wars/battles severely weakened the carrying capacity, governing structures, economies, fighting abilities & military bodies and the longevity of Europe's original Black/Brown populations and their population centers; in such a way that Black/Brown population numbers decreased overall, enough to create a vacuum situation where White Eurasian/Indo-European/Turkic tribes would come in and simply waltz in and fill in this vacuum just like the situation involving the Spaniards invading the Mayan civilization and filling in the void left there.


4) Mass population migrations and steppe incursions and invasions by barbarian White Indo-European/Turkic tribes, from North-East Europe, Central Asia and Siberia led to conflicts and battles which would end up disrupting and creating a large very significant population shift in phenotype and genetic structure of the overrall original populations of Europe. These mass migrations of White Europid and Eurasian type peoples ended up affecting trade routes and production lines as well draining the coffers and economies of the original black/brown population centers of Europe; to the point of exhausting the abilities of these population centers and old civilizations of Europe, along with intra-wars and civil wars of the ancient civilizations of Europe, to barr and prevent the circulations of mass white population wave migrations throughout Europe.

These steppe/Northern mass migrations throughout Europe also brought in the aformentioned plagues and epidemic outbreaks with them, which again overrall led a population replacement scenario of the entire region of Europe and it's earliest population centers (which were primarily black/brown). This replacement scenario led to a point where White Indo-European/Eurasian barbarian tribes were able to REPLACE AND USURP AND CAUSE AN OVERALL GENETIC POPULATION CHANGE OF THE ENTIRE REGION OF EUROPE, to a situation where the phenotype and genetic structure of modern White Europeans became the future majority of Europe as we see today.


5)Civilization intrigue, decay and demographic decline of the original civilizations and population centers of Europe, which were for the most part composed entirely of black/brown Europeans and not modern White Europeans. And they were mostly situated in Southern/South-Central Europe overall since the flow of civilization to Europe, WAS FROM AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST/ASIA TO EUROPE AND NOT FROM A NORTH-EAST AXIS TO EUROPE, which was the axis that White Indo-Europeans/Turkics/Eurasian barbarian nomadic peoples used to ENTER EUROPE AND POPULATE EUROPE FROM THE LATE NEOLITHIC TO ANCIENT TO THE EARLY MEDIEVAL ERAS! We have all heard accounts of how civilizations and empires all go through their primes and eventually wither and decline to termination.


Well by the time that all these climatic disasters and ecological shifts took place, and these major plague epidemics started occurring, the Greco-Roman civilization was already declining in overall morals and virtue and norms; hedonism and social decay was rife throughout these civilization to the point where there was a reduction in the birth rate of the original Black/brown peoples of Europe. This lead to the Greco-Roman civilization importing/bringing in masses of White barbarian peoples to perform jobs and tasks, much like illegal Mexicans in America do today, and which would eventually lead to their down fall and usurpation.


This mental state of the Greco-Roman civilization, led a demographic winter of the original Black/Brown population centers of Europe, where it would create circumstances that would attract white barbarian tribes to start infiltrating and invading black/brown population centers of Europe without much resistance, and eventually create a vulnerable state where the Greco-Roman civilization became open to invasions by White barbarian populations from Northern Europe+Central Asia/Siberia. This also led to the situation mentioned in #2 above, which led to a gigantic decrease of the original black/brown populations of Europe and their population centers.



The fact again, that this recent article clearly mentions the fact that merely 10% of the modern genomic lineage of modern White Britons and Europeans actually derive from this earliest Europe specimen and the fact that specimen DOES NOT RESEMBLE AND LOOK LIKE MODERN WHITE POPULATIONS, is ALL THE MORE PROOF THAT THE ABOVE SCENARIO TOOK PLACE THAT LED TO EUROPE HAVING A GIANT POPULATION SHIFT THAT LED TO THE AVERAGE PHENOTYPE OF MODERN WHITE EUROPEANS AS WE SEE TODAY! The fact that this article mentions the fact there are genetic discontinuity between the earliest European settlers and MODERN WHITE EUROPEANS IS PROOF THAT MODERN WHITE EUROPEANS ARE RECENT MIGRANTS AND INVADERS TO EUROPE FROM OUTSIDE OF EUROPE!

The fact also that, and something we have proved countless times here and on ES, that modern WHITE EUROPEANS ARE ALBINOS AND NOT AN ACTUAL DISTINCT RACE OF PEOPLE; and the fact their white phenotype IS NOT THE RESULT OF ANY ENVIRONMENTAL ADAPTATION BUT A FREAK MUTATION INCIDENT CAUSED BY EXCESS RADIATION CREATED BY A NEAR-EARTH SUPERNOVA 8,000 years ago, ALSO LEADS TO THE FACT THAT MODERN WHITE EUROPEANS ARE NOT NATIVE TO EUROPE BUT MIGRATED TO EUROPE FROM RELATIVELY RECENTLY AND DID NOT EVOLVE IN EUROPE!


To see just how much a giant effect that plague epidemic and outbreaks like the plague death had on the overall ORIGINAL POPULATIONS OF EUROPE, PLEASE READ THESE ARTICLES TO GRASP THE SCOPE OF THIS!

www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/effects/social.php

Social and Economic Effects of the Plague

The plague had large scale social and economic effects, many of which are recorded in the introduction of the Decameron. People abandoned their friends and family, fled cities, and shut themselves off from the world. Funeral rites became perfunctory or stopped altogether, and work ceased being done. Some felt that the wrath of God was descending upon man, and so fought the plague with prayer. Some felt that they should obey the maxim, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die." The society experienced an upheaval to an extent usually only seen in controlled circumstances such as carnival. Faith in religion decreased after the plague, both because of the death of so many of the clergy and because of the failure of prayer to prevent sickness and death.

The economy underwent abrupt and extreme inflation. Since it was so difficult (and dangerous) to procure goods through trade and to produce them, the prices of both goods produced locally and those imported from afar skyrocketed. Because of illness and death workers became exceedingly scarce, so even peasants felt the effects of the new rise in wages. The demand for people to work the land was so high that it threatened the manorial holdings. Serfs were no longer tied to one master; if one left the land, another lord would instantly hire them. The lords had to make changes in order to make the situation more profitable for the peasants and so keep them on their land. In general, wages outpaced prices and the standard of living was subsequently raised.

As a consequence of the beginning of blurring financial distinctions, social distinctions sharpened. The fashions of the nobility became more extravagant in order to emphasize the social standing of the person wearing the clothing. The peasants became slightly more empowered, and revolted when the aristocracy attempted to resist the changes brought about by the plague. In 1358, the peasantry of northern France rioted, and in 1378 disenfranchised guild members revolted. The social and economic structure of Europe was drastically and irretrievably changed.

and:

www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/black_impact_01.shtml

Black Death: The lasting impact
By Professor Tom James

The onset of the plague
Contemporaries were horrified by the onset of the plague in the wet summer of 1348: within weeks of midsummer people were dying in unprecedented large numbers. Ralph Higden of Chester, the best known contemporary chronicler thought 'scarcely a tenth of mankind was left alive'. His analysis of the scale of the mortality is repeated by other commentators. The phrase 'there were hardly enough living to care for the sick and bury the dead' is repeated in various sources including a chronicle compiled at St Mary's Abbey, York. The Malmesbury monk, writing in Wiltshire, reckoned that 'over England as a whole a fifth of men, women and children were carried to the grave'. The plague did not abate in the Winter but became even more virulent in the early months of 1349 and continued into 1350.

Chroniclers and administrators make numerous references to the extension of graveyards, for example in Bristol, and to the mass burial of bodies in pits. At Rochester (Kent) men and women cast their dead children into communal graves 'from which arose such a stench that it was barely possible to go past a churchyard'. Modern excavation of such pits in London, near The Tower on the site of former Royal Mint and in the cathedral close at Hereford, testify to these extreme measures. In London the pits took the form of long, narrow trenches with bodies laid in orderly rows: at Hereford the evidence was of more haphazard committal to the earth.

oday we have the benefit of hindsight. We know, as fourteenth-century people suspected, that the mortality caused by the bubonic plague of the Black Death was the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world. We also know that the mortality came to an end in the first outbreak soon after 1350; contemporaries could not have known this would happen - so far as they were concerned everyone might well die. Some treated each day as if it were their last: moral and sexual codes were broken, while the marriage market was revitalised by those who had lost partners in the plague.

We also know that the plague returned regularly, first in 1361 and then in the 1370s and 1380s and, as an increasingly urban disease, right through until the Great Plague of 1665 in London. But by around 1670 it disappeared from England for over two centuries until a number of outbreaks occurred either side of 1900. It was not until these modern outbreaks that the bacillus was identified and connection between rats and plague discovered. Despite all their best efforts people in the historic period had no remedy against the mysterious plague, except as Daniel Defoe put it, to run away from it.

Contemporary accounts

The sustained onslaught of plague on English population and society over a period of more than 300 years inevitably affected society and the economy. Evidence of the effects can be measured and responses traced not only in social and economic, political and religious terms, but also in changes in art and architecture. The effects of the Black Death in all these matters were disputed by contemporaries and are still hotly disputed today, which makes the topic so endlessly fascinating.


By way of example, Ralph Higden, a contemporary chronicler, argued that 'lords and great men escaped'. By contrast, Geoffrey le Baker, an Oxfordshire man, noted deaths among the nobility. And so there were: one of King Edward III's daughters, archbishops, bishops, abbots, abbesses, nobles and lords of manors died in the first outbreak. In 1361 the Duke of Lancaster, a leading general, was among the victims. Le Baker also noted the immediate effects on the young and strong: 'the weak and elderly it generally spared'. In 1361 we find references to the outbreak being especially fierce among children. Later plagues were especially violent, as noted above, in towns. At Southampton, for example, in the sixteenth century, between 15 and 25% of the population was carried off every twenty years by outbreaks of plague. However, there is no doubt that proportionately the hardest-hit part of society was the most numerous: the peasantry, labourers and artisans.

Society turned upside down


Following the plague we find a clear sense of society turned upside down in England. The rulers of the kingdom reacted strongly. Some elements of legislation indicate a measure of panic. Within a year of the onset of plague, during 1349, an Ordinance of Labourers was issued and this became the Statute of Labourers in 1351. This law sought to prevent labourers from obtaining higher wages. Despite the shortage in the workforce caused by the plague, workers were ordered to take wages at the levels achieved pre-plague. Landlords gained in the short term from payments on the deaths of their tenants (heriots), but 'rents dwindled, land fell waste for want of tenants who used to cultivate it' (Higden) and '...many villages and hamlets were deserted...and never inhabited again'. Consequently, landed incomes fell. The bulging piles of manorial accounts which survive for the period of the Black Death testify to the active land-market and the additional administration caused by the onset of plague. But all too often the administration consists of noting defaults of rent because of plague (defectus causa pestilencie).

It has been argued that the Black Death brought about the end of feudalism. This was the system of service in return for a grant of land, burdening the peasant with many obligations to his lord. For example, payments were due on entering a land holding, upon marriage and death and on many other occasions. The Black Death did not start the process of the commutation (substitution) of a money payment for labour and other services. However, there is no doubt that the plague speeded up the process by reducing dramatically the numbers of peasants and artisans. By how much commutation accelerated is still a matter of fierce debate.

Government and landlords tried to keep the lid on rising wages and changing social aspirations. Lords and peasants alike were indicted for taking higher wages. In 1363 a Sumptuary Law was brought through parliament. This measure decreed not only the quality and colour of cloth that lay people at different levels of society (below the nobility) should use in their attire but also sought to limit the common diet to basics. Such legislation could only occur when the government had observed upwardly-mobile dress among the lower orders. Such legislation was virtually impossible to enforce, but indicates that among those who survived the plague there was additional wealth, from higher wages and from accumulated holdings of lands formerly held by plague victims.

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales of 1387 the well-known Prologue describes the dress of each pilgrim. Arguably, it demonstrates that apart from the knight, the poor parson and the ploughman, who personify each of the three traditional divisions of medieval society, every pilgrim is dressed more grandly that the Sumptuary Law would allow. The Canterbury Tales came six years after the Great Revolt of 1381 in which rebellion flared throughout much of England, the Kent and Essex men invaded London, chopped off Archbishop Sudbury's head and terrified the fourteen-year-old Richard II into agreeing concessions on the Poll Tax and other matters. The Poll Tax was an unsuccessful attempt by the government to combat the effects of plague by changing the basis of taxation from a charge on communities (many much less populous following successive plagues), with a tax on individuals who had survived. Chaucer, the court poet, was very aware of the anxieties of the elite in the new post-plague society. His Canterbury pilgrims, as the courtiers encountered them, were arranged 'by rank and degree' and sent back down the road to Canterbury in perfect order, led by the knight: precisely the opposite to the unruly mob which had marched up from Canterbury in 1381.


Never the same again

If lay society was never the same again after the Black Death, nor was the English Church. Contemporaries were quick to note that the Black Death killed proportionately at least as many clergy as laity. New recruits were noted as being of a lesser quality. Henry Knighton, writing in Leicester, said of these new clerks that many of them were illiterate, no better than laymen - 'for even if they could read, they did not understand'. Worse still, clergy post-plague demanded from twice to ten times more than before for a vicarage or chaplaincy.

Some clergy deserted their posts, and left their churches to 'wild beasts'. A fierce argument raged in the first half of the twentieth century between F.A. Gasquet, who became a cardinal in England, and the Cambridge historian G.G. Coulton over the effects of the plague on the medieval church. Gasquet saw the plague as a catastrophe which ruined the church in England through clergy mortality, and was among the seeds of the Reformation on the sixteenth century. Coulton, by contrast, argued that clergy mortality in the Black Death was exaggerated by monkish writers and that the clergy abandoned their posts and fled. There is evidence on both sides and the argument rages!

In summary, the vast majority of the population at the time of the Black Death was rural peasants who suffered the highest mortality and in so doing, became much more expensive and choosy about where they worked, and how they related to lords. Weakened communities provided the opportunity in the century and a half after the plague for landlords to clear lands and enclose them for sheep, so that Sir Thomas More, writing soon after 1500, saw the countryside as overrun and consumed by sheep. People certainly expected and obtained higher wages even in the church, whose authority was challenged by many, including Chaucer in his mocking Canterbury Tales. Recruitment to the parish clergy fell and monastic houses never recovered. In a sense the Black Death was the prehistory both of enclosure and of the Reformation. Perhaps Cardinal Gasquet was right when he noted long ago that the plague led to the emergence for the first time of a middle class (who chatter and challenge authority) funded by accumulating the wealth of those who had died. Thus the old medieval tripartite division of society into those who fought (the nobility and knights), those who prayed (the churchmen) and those who laboured (the peasants) was never the same again.

AND:

themedievalera.wikispaces.com/The+Black+Death+-+Social+Effects

The Black Death - Social Effects

The Black Death, also known as the Bubonic Plague, was the tragic end for most of the people of Europe in the 1300s. This disease killed all people, regardless of their age, social group, ethnicity, or believes. The loss of so many people, including the church leaders and bishops, brought despair amongst the ones who had survived. They would question God, wondering how He could bring such tragedy to the people, and how even the people who had worshiped Him for so long could not avoid this terrible death.[1]

As the disease affected more and more people, civilians got mad. They made many accusations of who they believed brought the illness over to Europe, and violence increased as time went on. Groups like the Jews were easy to blame, accused of manipulating sources of water and practicing witchcraft. The Europeans believed this was the reason for the Black Death, and persecuted the Jews, in hopes of ending the plague. Even with some villages setting authorities to protect them, the Jewish people could not escape the hatred and violence from the rest of the population. They fled Europe, and never returned. Contrary to Europeans’ beliefs, getting rid of the Jews did not end the deaths. [2]

The plague was the end of not only men, but animals and harvest too. As men died from the disease, no one was there to take care of their fiefs, killing the animals and crops on it. Because of this, starvation fell upon villages and towns, and men lost their manpower and were not able to work. Basic needs, like bread, were short on supply, leading to inflation. This rise of prices in the economy was hard on the poor, and they could not keep up with it.[3] Peasants that had survived the Black Death were convinced they were special, and that God had protected them from death. This changed peasants’ outlook on life, as they tried to find better wages, and even demanding so if a lord was desperate. This went against the Feudal System, and therefor caused for the government’s fury.[4]

Then, in 1351, the Law of Laborers was passed to try and suppress the peasant’s attempts in getting more money than they had before. The law stated that “No peasants could be paid more than the wages paid in 1346. No lord or master should offer more wages than paid in 1346. No peasants could leave the village they belonged to.” The peasants got even angrier with this law, because it wasn’t helping anyone - the peasants didn’t get the money they needed to survive, and the lords didn’t get the work they needed done. Although they knew going against this law would result in trouble, some peasants disobeyed it. In 1381, the peasants were so angry, they led revolts.



Peasants' Revolt

In June 1381, a man by the name of Wat Tyler from Kent led a group of angered peasants into London, England, and ran a revolt. They were unhappy about the amount of tax that the government had made them pay, and with the extent of work they were forced to do for the Church with no pay. The peasants could not support their families this way, and were ready to fight the government to get what they deserve. The infuriated people burned down buildings, destroyed housing, and killed people who they thought to be associated with taxes.

After a while, some got frustrated and lazy, getting drunk frequently. Those who had lost discipline murdered foreigners, and later would murder the archbishop and Treasurer of London by cutting off their heads from the top of the Tower of London. Richard II, The king of London at the time, had met with the protesters twice. In both gatherings, he had given the peasants what they asked for, in hopes that they would leave London in peace. It was only after Wat Tyler was murdered at the second meeting that they agreed to leave London alone.[6]



The Black Death is a serious disease that affected all of Europe. It caused people to get tumors all over their body. After the Black Death, the social structure of the medieval ages changed dramatically. Many things in society changed during this time. These changes affected daily life and caused major disruptions in all of Europe. Nearly one third of all the population died from this terrible disease.

The Black Death raged in England from 1348 to 1350.Not only did the plague kill many people, it also impacted the social structure of many European countries. In England, the Black Death led to the Peasants Revolt of June 1381. After the plague many peasants and serfs realized that they could receive better pay for their labor. To stop this, the government created a law called the statute of Labourers, that said that peasants could not receive more pay than they did in 1346 and that no lord should offer them more than that.

It also stated that peasants could not leave their village. Peasants knew that not following these laws would result in serious consequences. This caused the peasants to revolt in 1381. Another cause for the revolt was that many peasants had to work for the church for no pay. This stopped them from growing their own crops and caring for their own land and families. Also, the peasants needed to pay very high taxes that they could not afford. An army of peasants marched into London and captured the Tower of London. Many people were killed. King Richard II was the king during the revolt. He was only fourteen during this time, but he was able to compromise with the peasants.[7]

A key person during this time was King Edward III. He was the king of England during the plague. The Black Death caused a great disruption in his court. Everyone was getting sick, including government officials. Even the king’s daughter, Joan, got the disease while traveling through France. She died on September 2, 1348. During this time, he tried to enforce the statute of Labourers to create less movement of the peasants, but was unsuccessful.[8]

The Black Plague caused many disturbances in the social structure of many countries, and was a terrible tragidy to those living during this time.

And to see THE GENETIC EFFECTS OF THE EPIDEMICS AND PLAGUES LIKE THE DEATH, ON THE MODERN POPULATION OF WHITE EUROPEANS, PLEASE LOOK AT THESE ARTICLES:

geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/08/21/exposure-to-the-black-plague-modified-human-genes-no-biotech-needed/

Black Plague modified human genes, no biotech needed



Evidence continues to build that at least part of our ancestors’ story is encoded in our DNA. This takes the form of environmental pressures such as pathogens actually causing modifications in genetic structure over short timescales.

In a story published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on how the Black Plague altered the European gene pool a research team from the Netherlands looked at two culturally distinct groups from India and Europe (who eventually co-located) and found that they began to share parallel changes in their genes after co-location. They concluded it was likely owing to exposure to the organism responsible for the Black Death.

Principal author Mihai Netea and his colleagues unraveled this thread by looking at over 190,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with advanced scanning methods. SNPs are short segments of DNA that vary among people with different traits. Netea and his team tested people from Romania, as well as Roma people, who have lived among Europeans since about A.D. 1000.

Interestingly, Netea claims that for social and economic reasons, there has not been much interbreeding between the two groups. This peculiarity gives Netea and his team a rare opportunity to study two genetically-distinct populations in one geographical region. This allows the researchers to take a look at the independent genetic tracks the groups developed along and not have to worry about any found differences being the result of differences in location.

The team observed that some of the genetic responses that were co-developing across the two groups were found in one immune-related cluster of three altered genes called TLR2. The TLR2 gene codes for Toll-like receptor 2, which is a membrane protein that acts as a receptor so that immune cells (leukocytes) are able to recognize foreign pathogens. What’s interesting about this protein is that it is especially sensitive to exposure to the Gram-negative organism Yersinia pestis, cause of the Black Plague (and the the Justinianic Plague, which ravaged Byzantium in the sixth century).



According to Netea, “[Humans] were modified, basically, by the infections.”

The study had a few weaknesses, including the fact that the researchers were post-hoc looking for associations in humans who died 600-700 years ago; drawing inferences in such genetic modifications based on a snapshot in time; and attempting to attribute causality to a mix of immediate and persistent genetic changes. Nevertheless, the results so far are intriguing. Netea and his team found “a list of about 20 genes that show evidence of convergent evolution between Europeans and Roma—meaning the two groups started out different but evolved to look more similar because of pressures in their environment.”

We shouldn’t be surprised to (re-) learn that all of our traits currently thriving on Earth are the long-run result of nearly infinite permutations of genetic modification, our evolutionary response to environmental selective pressure. What this research finding provides is a satisfying sense that our ongoing hypotheses of how Earth’s species survive and thrive — or disappear — through genetic adaptation and selective pressure, have been validated once again.

AND:

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

Black Death casts a genetic shadow over England
By Colin Barras



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.

^^^Clearly these articles above are proof and CLEAR EVIDENCE, that the factors I listed led to a displacements and eventual replacement of the original BLACK/BROWN Europeans and their population centers in ancient to early medieval Europs; by WHITE EUROPID TYPE PEOPLES COMING IN FROM NORTHERN EUROPE, CENTRAL ASIA AND SIBERIA IN MASSIVE POPULATION WAVES THROUGH MIGRATIONS/INVASIONS/IMMIGRATION PERIODS!

[mindovermatter]

In linkage to and to supplement my previous above post, please look at this readers!


PLEASE READ ALL THESE ARTICLES, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE ORIGINS AND ROOTS OF WHERE MODERN WHITE EUROPEANS COME FROM AND HOW MODERN WHITES ARE NOT NATIVE OR INDIGENOUS TO EUROPE (sorry for the caps):


webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kEUWqJmA-VEJ:www.diogenesresearch.org/English/mysteriouscentralasia.htm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dCTBcClMJF4J:www.diogenesresearch.org/English/prehistries.htm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NAHa3Db4GVQJ:www.diogenesresearch.org/English/indoeurfromsteppes.htm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/ancienthistoryfun.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/peopleofwolf.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/abandonedheroes.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/Alemanni.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasiongermans.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasionsteppeaction.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasiongothaction.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasionxianbei.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasionstorm.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/eurasianbrotherhoodcaucasoidinasia.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/eurasianbrotherhoodbarbariansmarch.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasionsearchforhomeland.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasionshapingofeurope.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/barbarianinvasionnewasianorder.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesagesdrawnofeurope.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesageschinarenewal.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesagesfrankishkingdom.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesagescharlemagne.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesagesvikings.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesagesturksrising.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/middlesagesrussiansteppe.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/turanturanian.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/mysteriousturks.html

www.diogenesresearch.org/English/shanhaijing.htm

Related:


www.diogenesresearch.org/English/unlikelyculturalroots.htm