These 4 Pandemics Changed the Course of Human History

Do food shortages, social distancing or political posturing define your current life?

If so, you can at least take some comfort in the fact that it isn’t the first time in history that people have had to deal with such problems. Life under pandemics such as the Black Death or the 1918 influenza outbreak entailed many of the same conditions we are experiencing today — and many that were much worse.

To put things into historical perspective, we’ve highlighted four earlier pandemics and the conditions people faced.

Read more at Discover Magazine. 

Angkor Wat May Owe Its Existence to an Engineering Catastrophe

The empire controlled much of mainland Southeast Asia by the beginning of the 10th century A.D., but unclear rules of succession combined with a complicated web of royal family intermarriages led to a crisis. Jayavarman IV, a grandson of a previous king, contested the rule of the leaders in Angkor, the traditional seat of power. In the 920s, he set up a new capital at Koh Ker, about 75 miles to the northeast. Koh Ker flourished until 944 when Jayavarman IV’s son and successor was killed, and the next Khmer king moved the capital back to Angkor.

“It’s a very interesting period in Angkorian history where it looks like you’ve got serious competition for rulership,” says Miriam Stark, director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.

Dogs show a nose for archaeology by sniffing out 3,000 year old tombs

The scent-tracking abilities of trained dogs have helped archaeologists discover iron age tombs in Croatia dating back nearly three thousand years.

The dogs sniffed out burial chests containing human bones and artefacts in a hilltop fort in the Velebit mountains along the Adriatic coast. Experts have said that using dogs could be a good way to identify archaeological sites, as it is less destructive than many traditional methods.

Read more at The Guardian.

‘Metal Pirates’ Are Scrapping Parts From Sunken World War II Wrecks

“Metal pirates” are looting sunken World War II ships for bronze propellers and other pieces of scrap, tearing slabs of metal from historical vessels that sometimes serve as maritime graves.

“In more recent years it’s not the treasure that’s making people go look for wrecks, it’s the metal,” said Kim Browne, a lecturer in international law at Charles Sturt University in Australia and the author of a new study in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology. “The metal and bronze and all the casings of the electrical components of the ship bring in large amounts of money.”

But many of the vessels now rest in the waters of countries that were largely victimized in World War II, and their local governments aren’t always keen to protect wrecks that symbolize a troubling colonial history. Moreover, many of these sunken ships, aircraft, and even some submarines also contain explosive ordinance, oil or chemicals that can pollute the surrounding marine environments.

Read more at Inside Science. 

Mesoamerican Sculptures Reveal Early Knowledge of Magnetism

Magnets are a mystery that has baffled scientists and philosophers for millennia, and researchers still don’t fully understand the properties that give magnetic fields their potency. Ancient Greek legend held that a shepherd named Magnes first discovered the curious force when a stone pulled at his iron staff in an area of Greece then known as Magnesia.

Whether or not Magnes the shepherd actually existed, he wasn’t the only ancient human to notice the funny characteristics of certain types of stone. The first culture to become aware of magnetic material is a matter of open debate, but new evidence suggests ancient cultures in the Americas had knowledge of magnetic forces long before the first pocket compasses.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

Before the Inca Ruled South America, the Tiwanaku Left Their Mark on the Andes

Hundreds of years before the Inca Empire spread along the Pacific coast of South America, another civilization prospered in parts of what is now Bolivia, northern Chile and southern Peru. The Tiwanaku state, which lasted from about 550 to 950 A.D., was one of three major first-millennium powers in the Andes, but very little archaeological evidence has been found from the Tiwanaku compared to the Incas, whose empire rose to the height of its power in the 15^th century.

While much of Tiwanaku’s culture and history remain a mystery today, new archaeological research in the region is starting to fill in some of the gaps. A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details ancient Tiwanaku artifacts and the remains of sacrificial llamas. Dredged from the high-altitude waters of Lake Titicaca, the objects reveal the underpinnings of Andean rituals that would last for more than a thousand years.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

Ancient Mongolia was a good place to live—if you could survive the horse falls

Thousands of years before Genghis Khan and his descendants conquered vast stretches of Eurasia, the pastoral people of Mongolia lived healthy, but violent, lifestyles, new research reveals.

Although some Mongolians remain nomadic in modern days, researchers didn’t know how far back this tradition stretched. Any early nomadic pastoralists would have been healthier than sedentary people, who, especially before the advent of trash pickup and sewage infrastructure, lived more densely and among their own waste.

Read more at Science. 

Thousand-Year-Old Rock Art Likely Served as a Gathering Point for Llama Caravans Crossing the Andes

Hundreds of years before the Inca road system connected a sprawling empire, a more modest network of trails linked the small communities that lined the mountains and coastlines of South America. These trails, snaking through the Andes, supported a vibrant network of llama caravans, which may have been the driving force behind elements of cultural continuity that have been shared by different South American societies for the last millennium—and perhaps even longer.

“These caravanners were the lubricant for more than just trade goods,” says Nicholas Tripcevich, a research associate and lab manager at the University of California, Berkeley. “They served an important role linking people. They probably spread information, stories.”

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

The Maya Captured, Traded and Sacrificed Jaguars and Other Large Mammals

In 776 A.D., the last king of Copan eagerly sought to prove his suitability to rule the Maya city state. More than a decade into his tenure, Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat built the final version of a temple in the Copan Valley of modern-day Honduras, situated above the tomb of the city’s founder and complete with a monumental altar at its base. The monument remains one of the primary sources of information about Copan’s royalty, depicting Yopaat and each of his 15 dynastic predecessors going back roughly four centuries, built to legitimize his leadership during troubled times.

“It shows how the last ruler is getting power from the founding ruler and all of his ancestors,” says Nawa Sugiyama, an archaeologist at George Mason University in Virginia who was a Peter Buck Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History at the time of research.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine. 

A New Generation Is Reviving Indigenous Tattooing

To celebrate her graduation from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Native Studies program in 2012, Marjorie Kunaq Tahbone got a tattoo. Tahbone is Inupiat, an Alaska Native people, and the design was a traditional Inupiat pattern: three solid lines that spread downward from underneath the middle of her lower lip to her chin.

Tahbone was unsure, however, how the people in her home village would react. Nome is a town of about 3,800 people on Alaska’s northwestern coast, only reachable by plane or, in the warmer months, boat. Although many people there are Alaska Natives, traditional tattoos were a rare sight at that time.

Within days of receiving her tattoo, people started to notice. In a local store, a village elder reached out and touched her tattoo. In the weeks to follow, on two different occasions, babies, whom Tahbone was holding and playing with, fingered the pattern on Tahbone’s face.

The infants’ actions had profound resonance. Among Inupiat communities, babies receive the names of the recently deceased. When the infants touched her tattoo, Tahbone felt they were tapped into the memories of the past lives of deceased Inupiat. “When I was acknowledged by babies, it was like an acknowledgment of my ancestors,” she says.

Read more at Sapiens.