How Easily Volcanos and Their Aftermath Changed Human History!
Currently, I am just watching to much news as I watch my childhood backyard burn down. But it was something that I was looking at as I was reviewing were to start in history. I am interested in prehistory, i.e. the before written history and the Neanderthal’s, but I am not really wanting to be in that area of history which is a lot of best guess work by historians based on the information that they can pull from the ground, DNA, climate, etc. But one of my issues is that so many historians think and teach that people born before us were not as bright as we are because they didn’t advance as quickly as we have. I think that they are very wrong!
If you look around the world, you see these civilizations that were advancing and then just disappeared before they could advance further. But what I have found is that all these civilizations tend to have one thing in common, Mother Nature throws them a death blow. Some times it is quick with things like a earthquake, flood, volcano, etc. Other items, it is humans that over use their resources such as solid, over population, etc.
The death blow tends to stir humans into religious, political, and social chaos. Most, if not all, advancements are walked away from and we return to basic survival mood into small groups and cities get abandoned. If you go through the United States and the Americas, you can find cities that once had lots of people and are now ghost towns. Many of the modern ghost towns of the United States lost there populations due to the minerals booms and bust like gold and silver in the west and coal mining industries in West Virginia. The humans here, we know what happen too. They moved to new cities or a few held on and made something of the city which is mostly abandoned.
Then you have the Maya civilization that collapsed and has become hidden in the rain forest and have been found again in modern history. But you also have a major event that happened in the America’s about 1250’s, a lot of Native Americans seemed to disappear. Their populations went down and their culture changed. If you travel around New Mexico and the Southwest, you can see places that once had a large population centers that seem to disappear over night around the 1250’s.
In 1257, Mount Samalas erupted in Indonesia. The flow of this volcano buried the Kingdom of Lombok and killed most of the human habitations in this kingdom and others around it. The ash fell as far away as Java which was about 210 miles away. But this also sent aerosols into the atmosphere which caused a volcanic winter and cooled the Earth’s atmosphere for years. Scientist believed that it helped trigger the Little Ice Age which through written history in Europe led to famines, crop failures, and in turn changed human history around the world.
In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted. It buried Ancient Romanian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This eruption was buried it’s citizens and cities to time. They have been excavated in modern history which is giving us a wonderful insight of Roman people at this time. This was also only about 46 years after the death of Jesus which means that this city would not have been that much different from other cities in the Roman Empire. It was also written about from the survivors that made it out, i.e. those people that were out at sea when it happened or some how made it out of the area which were few of the residents.
Neanderthal’s went extinct, Scientist have been looking at what caused them to become extinct. The different causes have been changing since they have been found in Europe. But recently, they have found that climate might have been the main cause. A major event happened. They lived mainly in the Europe area but like modern humans, some traveled around. The climate that they evolved in was colder and their bodies were made for that colder environment. But they also found that an eruption took place about the same time that the Neanderthals started to lose their population.
They are finding that Campi Flegrei near Naples, Italy which is not that far from Mount Vesuvius is a super volcano. They are looking for the perfect date and they think that it might have been about 39,000 years ago which is about the same time that the Neanderthal’s went extinct. Modern humans were around at this time. The modern humans were also effected by this volcano.
The volcano put a lot of ash into the air around the world which created a dark sky for years. The Europe and Asia got the worst of it. Most of the Neanderthal’s and humans that lived in these areas died both during the volcanic event and shortly after as from the volcano ash and gases it created then from starvation. A few groups of Neanderthals escaped from this death sentence of the super volcano as they lived on the outer edges of the blast. For another 15,000 years, the Neanderthal lasted but the issue was that they just slowly slipped away into history. But not totally. With the new DNA test, it seems that humans have up to 2% of Neanderthal DNA in us.
In 1783 and 1784, Laki’s fissure vents (cracks in rock that leak lava without an eruption) and the volcano Grimsvotn in Iceland erupted over an 8 month period. It killed most of the crops and half of the life stock and between 20 and 25 percent of the human population through famine and poisonous compounds in the air just in Iceland. But it also created issues around the world.
Egypt lost about 1/6 of its population from famine as the Nile river did not get the precipitation that it needed to flood the fields. India was already in a famine and it just got worst. Both Japan and eastern China may have been effected as Japan’s Mount Asama erupted which caused a famine from 1782-1788 and a drought in eastern China. In North America, one of the longest and coldest winters on record hit in 1784. The Mississippi River froze in New Orleans, the south was hit with huge snowstorms, and some reports of ice floes in the Gulf of Mexico.
But Europe got it the worst as a haze spread across Europe. The fog was so thick that ships stayed ashore because they were unable to navigate. The sulfur dioxide that was in this haze was inhaled by populations across Europe killing tens of thousands people. During the summer, severe thunderstorms developed with large hailstones that could kill cattle showered down. The winter was very severe with 28 day of frost. In the spring, severe flooding happened. For several years, Europe experienced extremes weather patterns and bad crops.
In 1785, France had a failed harvest, leadership that didn’t understand or know how to deal with it, church’s that owned 10% of the countries lands, and an increased poverty, deaths, and famine in the poor populations. By 1789, the French Revolution started and Napoleon would rise to the position of Emperor as he started Wars throughout Europe and into Russian. All this suffering that was cause because a volcano in Iceland erupted and started a fire in the population that took years to put down.
As I look though know history, I see the same pattern happening. A population that is growing thriving and starting a society with a civilization with cities, arts, religions, housing, etc. At the beginning, most of the people are on the same level with leaders coming to the top and followers that are happy to follow as their lives are easier overall with a middle class starting to develop. Then a change with those that are part of the higher social class become richer and more powerful with each generation with a middle class and a working class. Then a upper class that stops caring about the middle and lower class with both of those classes finding that they can’t feed their families but they are not complete unconfortable.
A major volcano that goes off and effects the weather pattern which leads to famine, increase diseases and deaths with people lacking basic food, a growing extremes between the rich and the poor in societies, political in fighting within the upper classes and then a collapse of a society or a revolution takes place.
It could be a volcano, pandemic, something that hits us from space, or other natural disaster, possible a war of thoughts or ideas or a war with our neighbor that can start this pattern but the pattern of history is always the same. The ruling class, i.e. the richest in society, stop thinking about how to take care of the middle class who are now sinking into the lower class and a volcano erupts within the middle and lower classes and in the case of the French, Madame Guillotine comes out until all that is left is a new upper class littered with the deaths of the old upper class to began again in modern history and in old history a breaking of the civilization into small groups as the famine, diseases, and deaths leave so few behind to pick up the pieces.
I believe that this is the stuff that leaves me questioning where are we at today and how do we stop this pattern of from happening again. The other way is to look back at history and discover were the small cracks in society were, what are the warning signs, and do we have time to turn back the clock and stop the eruption from happening again.