Plagues and Peoples (43 page)

10.
Cf. lists of species extinctions in Darlington, op. cit., p. 33. These (and later North American extinctions) may or may not have been due to human agency. Cf. the debate as presented in Paul S. Martin and H. E. Wright, eds.,
Pleistocene Extinctions, the Search for a Cause
(New Haven, 1967). Among the species that suffered extinction Darlington does not list the diverse humanoid forms of life that once existed in Africa; but it is clear that less formidable variants within the humanoid family were among the most vulnerable, with the result that by 20,000
B.C
., if not earlier, only one species,
Homo sapiens
, survived.

11.
On the peculiar concentration of protozoal and helminthic infestations in sub-Saharan Africa, see table in Darlington, op. cit., p. 662.

12.
I have consulted David Pilbeam,
The Ascent of Man: An Introduction to Human Evolution
(New York, 1972); Frank E. Poirier,
Fossil Man: An Evolutionary Journey
(St. Louis, Missouri, 1973); and B. J. Williams,
Human Origins, an Introduction to Physical Anthropology
(New York, 1973) in connection with these remarks.

13.
Joseph B. Birdsell, “Some Population Problems Involving Pleistocene Man,”
Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology
, 20 (1957), 47–69, estimates that a mere 2, 200 years sufficed to populate Australia. Cf. also Joseph B. Birdsell, “On Population Structure in Generalized Hunting and Collecting Populations,”
Evolution
, 12 (1958), 189–205;, “Some Predictions for the Pleistocene Based on Equilibrium Systems Among Recent Hunters-Gatherers,” in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds.,
Man the Hunter
, pp. 229–40.

14.
For Australian rabbits, cf. the very instructive book, Frank Fenner and F. N. Ratcliffe,
Myxomatosis
(Cambridge, 1965). For the American scene, cf. Alfred W. Crosby,
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(Westport, 1972). More generally, Charles S. Elton,
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
(New York, 1958).

15.
Paul S. Martin, “The Discovery of America,”
Science
, 179 (1973), 969–74.

16.
N. A. Croll,
Ecology of Parasites
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1966), pp. 98–104 and
passim
. Croll is concerned mainly with multicellular parasites, but his observations are applicable to all parasitic forms of life, though, as we will see, the distribution of the viral and bacterial organisms that cause the most important forms of infectious disease among civilized populations is governed mainly by the density of potential hosts, and thus diverges widely from climatically regulated patterns. F. L. Dunn, “Epidemiological Factors: Health and Disease in Hunter-Gatherers,” in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds.,
Man the Hunter
, pp. 226–28, also has some interesting things to say about biological diversity and human infections in different climates. Cf. also René Dubos,
Man Adapting
(New Haven, 1965), p. 61.

17.
Study of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal skeletons allows tentative assignment of ages at time of death. According to the data assembled on this basis in Paul A. Janssens,
Paleopathology: Diseases and Injuries of Prehistoric Man
(London, 1970), pp. 60–63, 88.2 per cent of Cro-Magnon remains were less than forty years of age at the time of death, and 61.7 per cent were less than thirty. Corresponding figures for Neanderthal remains were 95 per cent and 80 per cent. Such calculations are, however, based on statistically unsatisfactory samples, and criteria for the assignment of age at death are often ambiguous.

18.
Cf. Saul Jarcho, “Some Observations on Diseases in Prehistoric America,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
, 38 (1964), 1–19; T. D. Stewart, “A Physical Anthropologist’s View of the Peopling of the New World,”
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology
, 16 (1960), 265–66, and Lucille E. St. Hoyme, “On the Origins of New World Paleopathology,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
, 21 (1969), 295–302. J. V. Neel et al., “Studies of the Xavante Indians of the Brazilian Mato Grosso,”
American Journal of Human Genetics
, 16 (1964), 110, speaks of the “exuberant health” of the men of the tribe he studied, although he found the women not so vigorous or free from infestation. Travelers’ reports emphasizing the health of primitive peoples on first contact with the outside world abound, though their accuracy is suspect. Cf. Robert Fortuine, “The Health of the Eskimos as Portrayed in the Earliest Written Accounts,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
, 45 (1971), 97–114. On the other hand, in and near the presumed original tropic home of earliest mankind, diseases of many kinds flourish among remote and isolated communities as well as in larger ones. Cf. Ivan V. Polunin, “Health and Disease in Contemporary Primitive Societies,” in Don Brothwell and A. T. Sandison,
Diseases in Antiquity
, pp. 69–97. On the presumed good health of Australian aborigines before European con-
tact, cf. B. P. Billington, “The Health and Nutritional Status of the Aborigines,” in Charles P. Mountford, ed.,
Records of the American-Australian Expedition to Arnhem Land
(Melbourne, 1960), I, 27–59.

1.
The list is long (two hundred genera of herbivores and dependent carnivores), and includes such potentially useful animals as horses and camels in North America. Cf. Paul Schultz Martin and H. E. Wright,
Pleistocene Extinctions
, pp. 82–95 and
passim
. Recent calculations of biomass in Africa, where extinctions of large-bodied animals were far less catastrophic than elsewhere, show how very great a food loss the disappearance of large-bodied prey could be. Elephants and hippopotamuses alone, for instance, constitute about 70 per cent of the entire animal biomass of African savanna lands. Even in places where zebra and wildebeest are the two largest herbivores, those two species constitute at least 50 per cent of the total estimated animal biomass. Cf. F. Clark Howell and François Boulière,
African Ecology and Human Evolution
, pp. 44–8.

For an interesting effort to bring economic analysis to bear on the phenomenon of extinction through overkill, see Vernon L. Smith, “The Primitive Hunter Culture, Pleistocene Extinctions, and the Rise of Agriculture,”
Journal of Political Economy
, 83 (1975), 727–56. If Pleistocene extinctions were the work of human hunters, that catastrophic ancient overkill closely parallels our modern industrial squandering of fossil fuels. There is a difference: moderns will probably require fewer centuries to destroy the principal energy base of their existence than our prehistoric forebears needed to kill off theirs.

2.
Cf. Sherwood Washburn and C. Lancaster, “The Evolution of Hunting,” in Richard C. Lee and Irven DeVore,
Man the Hunter
, pp. 293–303; Kent V. Flannery, “Origins and Ecological Effects of Early Domestication in Iran and the Near East,” in Peter Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, eds.,
The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals
(Chicago, 1969), pp. 77–87.

3.
On the special conditions of early Chinese agriculture see Ping-ti Ho, “The Loess and the Origins of Chinese Agriculture,”
American Historical Review
, 75 (1969), 1–36. For Amerindian cultivation see R. S. MacNeish, “The Origins of American Agriculture,”
Antiquity
, 39 (1965), 87–93.

4.
For instructive remarks on hyperinfestation and its relation to human activities, see N. A. Cr oil,
Ecology of Parasites
, pp. 115ff.

5.
Ivan V. Polunin, “Health and Disease in Contemporary Societies,” in Don Brothwell and A. T. Sandison,
Disease in Antiquity
, pp. 74, 84.

6.
Estimates of ancient populations are entirely speculative, based on assumptions about density per square mile. For two such global estimates see Kent V. Flannery, “Origins and Ecological Effects of Early Domestication in Iran and the Near East,” in Peter Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby,
The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals
, p. 93; D. R. Brothwell, “Dietary Variation and the Biology of Earlier Human Populations,” ibid., pp. 539–40.

7.
For details see C. A. Wright, “The Schistosome Life Cycle,” in F. K. Mostofi, ed.,
Bilharziasis
(New York, 1967), pp. 3–7.

8.
Today Egypt is the best-known home of schistosomiasis; but much of eastern and western Africa, together with western Asia, the rice paddies of eastern Asia, and offshore areas like the Philippines and parts of Brazil are also infected. Three different varieties of blood flukes are involved; and local strains are often specific to local mollusks, making a very complex and still imperfectly understood series of local variations in the character and, for humans, the severity of the disease. Cf. Louis Olivier and Nasser Ansari, “The Epidemiology of Bilharziasis,” in F. K. Mostofi, ed.,
Bilharziasis
, pp. 8–14.

9.
Marc Armand Ruffer,
Studies in Paleopathology of Egypt
(Chicago, 1921), p. 18, reports the discovery of schistosome eggs in the kidneys of two mummies from the XXth dynasty. He found such eggs in two out of six kidneys examined; and since the kidneys are not the organ blood flukes are most likely to infect (their usual home being the bladder and soft viscera that were discarded by ancient embalmers) it seems likely that schistosomiasis was as common in ancient as it is in modern Egypt.

10.
J. V. Kinnier Wilson, “Organic Diseases of Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Diseases in Antiquity
, pp. 191–208, tries to fit cuneiform terminology into modern medical classifications of disease. This is a hopeless enterprise and nothing he reports sounds in the least like schistosomiasis. Cf. also Georges Contenau,
La Médicine en Assyrie et la Babylonie
(Paris, 1938), and Robert Biggs,”Medicine in Ancient Mesopotamia,”
History of Science
, 8 (1969), 94–105. On early contacts between Mesopotamia and Egypt, cf. Helene J. Kantor,”Early Relations of Egypt with Asia,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
, 1 (1942), 174–213.

11.
“A Lady from China’s Past,”
The National Geographic
, 145 (May 1974), 663. The corpse, which was of high social rank, also carried tuberculosis scars in the lungs.

12.
Cf. J. N. Lanoix, “Relations Between Irrigation Engineering and Bilharziasis,” World Health Organization,
Bulletin
, 18 (1958), 1011–5.

13.
In modern Egypt, hookworm was and remains almost or quite as important as schistosomiasis in debilitating the population. Globally,
hookworm is more widespread than schistosomiasis, since it only requires moist soils and a barefoot population to spread from host to host.

14.
Karl A. Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power
(New Haven, Connecticut, 1957) is the principal modern scholar to develop the notion that there was a peculiar type of totalitarianism associated with what he calls hydraulic civilizations.

15.
What modern diseases correspond to biblical leprosy is a much disputed and quite insoluble question. Cf. Vilhelm Møller-Christensen, “Evidences of Leprosy in Earlier Peoples,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Diseases in Antiquity
, pp. 295–306; Olaf K. Skinsnes, “Notes from the History of Leprosy,”
International Journal of Leprosy
, 41 (1973), 220–7.

16.
Olivier and Ansari, op. cit., p. 9.

17.
See below, p. 232.

18.
René Dubos,
Man Adapting
, p. 237; George Macdonald,
The Epidemiology and Control of Malaria
(London, 1957), p. 33 an
à passim
.

19.
Frank B. Livingstone, “Anthropological Implications of Sickle Cell Gene Distribution in West Africa,”
American Anthropologist
, 60 (1958), 533–62.

20.
Detailed accounts of events in five different regions of Africa may be found in John Ford,
The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem
(Oxford, 1971). Cf. also Charles N. Good, “Salt, Trade and Disease: Aspects of Development in Africa’s Northern Great Lakes Region,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies
, 5 (1972), 43–86; H. W. Mulligan, ed.,
The African Trypanosomiases
(London, 1970), pp. 632ff. According to Mulligan, the outbreaks of sleeping sickness in the twentieth century are by-products of a sharp initial disturbance of ecological relationships in Africa arising from the catastrophic spread of rinderpest among African game animals in the 1890s. Die-off of herds was so extensive as to compel a shrinkage of tsetse range, together with a simultaneous reduction in domesticated herds and their ranges. As wild and domesticated herds recovered and began to expand their territories, interpenetration began to occur, allowing transfer of the trypanosome to human populations at many points along the expanding frontier of herding and agriculture. Such a view puts less blame on colonial administration, more weight on ecological processes, than Ford’s book does, though the two authorities agree as to fundamental data.

21.
Cf. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, “Studies on Shingles: Is the Virus Ordinary Chicken Pox?”
Lancet
, 2 (1954), 1299–1302; R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, “The Nature of
Herpes Zoster
: A Long-Term Study and a New Hypothesis,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine
, 48 (1865), 8–20.

22.
Francis L. Black, “Infectious Diseases in Primitive Societies,”
Science
, 187 (1975), 515–18. T. Aidan Cockburn,
The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases
(Baltimore and London, 1963), pp. 84ff; Macfarlane Burnet and David O. White,
Natural History of Infectious Disease
, 4th edition (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 147–48; T. W. M. Cameron,
Parasites and Parasitism
(London, 1956), pp. 284ff.