Message #16329

[Bianca]

10. Arguments from Europe




Apparently there are no particular discontinuities in Europe in the second half of the 12th century, a period of rather intensive economic growth, a fact therefore indicating that, if a catastrophe hit the Pacific basin, it did not affect the opposite hemisphere. However at the beginning of the 14th century Europe is affected by the great Black Death epidemics, usually attributed to the bacterium of plague ( bacillus pestis ), which, albeit certainly not as destructive as the Justinian plague, still killed an estimated 30% of the total population (this percentage varying from place to place, Bohemia quite intriguingly escaping almost completely). The plague seems to have started in Mediterranean ports, involved in trade with the East, and along the caravan roads leading to central Asia. While Hoyle and Wickramasinghe [24] have suggested that the agents of the plague were bacterial material arrived from the sky and brought by comets (and that was a time of intense cometary activity....) the general consensus is that the plague came from Mongolia, where bacillus pestis is a common host in a variety of rats (and, be careful if you want to caress them, in Californian squirrels too...). In our proposed scenario of a severe wheather disruption in the Mongolian region, it may be surmised that the bacteria became more virulent and/or had easier access to a population immunologically weakened by famine and other difficulties. Or, and here we take the Hoyle et al. suggestion, the bodies impacting in the Pacific region, including the northern China and Mongolian region, may have brought a fresh resupply of bacterial material, possibly characterized by mutations. Such bacteria may have again found their usual host, the rats, and attacked more easily a population weakened by climate changes, famine and war and not yet immunized against the new mutation.