Pandemics Cause Misery and Death, But They Also Created Agriculture and Put Humans on Top of the Food Chain

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Three years into a global pandemic, the fact that infectious disease is capable of reshaping humanity is obvious. But seen in the context of sixty thousand years of human and scientific history, COVID-19 is simply the latest in a series of world-changing pathogens. In fact, the role that humans play in social and political change is often overstated. Instead, bacteria and viruses have been the invisible protagonists of mankind's ever-evolving story. Today’s guest is Jonathan Kennedy, author of “Pathogensis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues.” We discuss how Neanderthals and other early species of humans died out—not because they were cognitively inferior to Homo sapiens but because they were vulnerable to the diseases they carried; how disease triggered the agricultural revolution and allowed it to spread; how plague outbreaks in the 6th and 7th centuries led to the creation of modern states in Western Europe and the transformation of Islam into a world religion; and how infectious diseases aided the colonization of the Americas but inhibited the colonization of Africa

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's got a year with another episode of the History Unplugged podcast.
0:08.3	Three years after COVID-19 spread around the world, causing death, economic destruction,
0:12.5	and lockdowns in its wake, we're still trying to make sense of it all, and the first
0:15.9	drafts of its history have barely been written, but however future historians determine
0:19.9	the effect that COVID-19 had, there's nothing new about plagues, fundamentally altering
0:25.2	civilizations, or sometimes wiping them out completely.
0:28.1	We have multiple examples to choose from, all known ones like the Black Flag in 14th
0:32.1	century Europe, or Colorad and smallpox epidemics in the 19th century, but those are only
0:36.6	two of perhaps dozens of times that global epidemics killed off so much of the planet's population
0:42.2	that it practically resettings to a year's-zero.
0:44.8	This goes back to humanity's beginning.
0:46.6	For example, homo sapiens arguably outlived knee-and-r-thals because of paleolithic plagues.
0:51.8	The rise of agriculture 12,000 years ago could have happened because of plagues.
0:55.6	The reason that Europeans settled the new world instead of Africa during the age of discovery
0:59.9	is mostly thanks to malaria.
1:02.0	In today's episode, we're going to look at the multiple ways that plagues fundamentally
1:05.4	altered human civilization.
1:06.9	Today's guest is Jonathan Kennedy, author of the book Pathogenesis, a history of the
1:10.9	world in eight plagues.
1:12.6	Plagues have affected technology, when human populations step down than more efficient methods
1:17.4	of manufacturing and production had to be invented.
1:20.6	But the effect of plagues can even be seen in poor ice caps, with the massive devastation
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