Showing posts with label Aztec. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aztec. Show all posts

Saturday, 16 May 2020

Coronavirus watch: was this Britain's first major epidemic?


Over the centuries after Stonehenge was built, the descendants of the people who created it largely disappeared from Britain. They were farmers of Mediterranean appearance with dark hair and olive skin. 

The great stone circle was finished about 2500 BC, but examination of 150 ancient skeletons from all over the country suggests that over the next 500 years, our Mediterranean-type ancestors had dwindled to about 10 per cent of the population.

They were replaced by the 'Beaker people' who seem to have originated in Central Europe. In the absence of any evidence of a major conflict, some archaeologists suggest that they brought with them a disease or diseases to which the native people had no resistance. Some have even suggested it might have been bubonic plague, which returned with such devastating effect during the 300 years or so from 1348.  (See my posts of  3 and 25 April.)

If the theory is right, it would mirror what happened to the Aztecs, the Incas and the Maya, who were conquered not so much by Spanish conquistadors as by the smallpox and other diseases they brought with them.

Saturday, 31 December 2016

How humans have tried to control storms



In Lithuania in the olden days, they would drink beer, dance round bonfires, or sacrifice animals. In other Slav countries, maidens would be danced to death. In the British Isles, we burned humans and animals alive inside a great wickerwork idol (remember the cult horror film, The Wicker Man?), while the Aztecs sacrificed children. All these things were done to try to control the tempests which humanity has learned the hard way, can unleash immense destruction without warning.

It must all have sounded so primitive to those in more modern times, who tried to enlist science. So in Central Europe in the late nineteenth century, they fired mortars in vineyards and orchards to stop hailstorms, believing the shock waves in the atmosphere would stop the stones forming. Great success was claimed, but scientific experiments found the method useless.

In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union went for a more ambitious approach, trying to protect the cotton fields of Uzbekistan and other places from hailstorms by firing into the clouds rockets and artillery shells carrying silver or lead iodide crystals. The idea was to provide lots of nuclei around which stones could form, making them more numerous but smaller, and less able to do damage.

The Russians claimed that between 1968 and 1984 they achieved 80 per cent success, but American tests were unable to reproduce the results. 

For the full story of humanity’s attempts to control storms see my new book Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books). 

Tuesday, 13 August 2013

How smallpox conquered an empire


On this day…………….492 years ago, the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortes, took Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City. Cortes was a commander of extraordinary energy and daring, and he captured the Aztec capital with just a few hundred Spaniards, though it is often forgotten that his army also included tens of thousands of Indians.

And he had a secret weapon more deadly than any of the arms his men deployed so ruthlessly – smallpox. The Aztecs had no resistance to this disease introduced from Europe.

In the crowded streets of the capital, it spread like wildfire. The victims who found themselves covered from head to foot with agonising sores, called it the ‘great rash’. They ‘died in heaps, like bedbugs’, wrote a missionary.

Among those who perished was the Aztecs’ leader, Cuitlahuac. Still they held out heroically for three months, and when the Spaniards finally entered Tenochtitlán, they found themselves walking on the corpses of those killed by smallpox. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Monday, 17 May 2010

Smallpox

On this day…..261 years ago, Edward Jenner, the man who discovered the smallpox vaccine, was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. Jenner discovered that by infecting someone with the much milder cowpox virus, you could protect them against smallpox, which had been killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year.

The disease had done its cataclysmic worst, though, in the New World, where native populations were completely lacking in immunity. The Spanish conquistadores terrified the Indians with their fire-spitting guns, but actually the smallpox virus was the deadliest weapon they brought.

It began in the early sixteenth century by cutting a swath through the populations of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. Then Hernan Cortes took it with him to Mexico, and when the Aztecs tried to resist him, they were cut down by the virus, and “died in heaps, like bedbugs.”

The Incas met a similar fate, with their great king, Huayna Capac, among those who died. Smallpox, helped by other imported illnesses, like mumps and measles, would reduce their numbers from seven to just one million. (See also my blog of Nov 6.)