If you enjoy the video please hit "like" as it really helps me out! Let me know what other Neolithic and Bronze Age subjects you would like covered. Here are links to the other videos I referenced: Cucuteni-Trypillia culture: ua-cam.com/video/Bk2Qbf1YQbI/v-deo.html Neolithic Britain: ua-cam.com/video/ZuZLxWvv5vg/v-deo.html Funnelbeaker culture: ua-cam.com/video/iJYvhf0VVi0/v-deo.html Pitted Ware culture: ua-cam.com/video/_rspqObP2yg/v-deo.html The First Horse Riders: ua-cam.com/video/AMHqp0M0T4Q/v-deo.html Neolithic playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLUyGT3KDxwC-oYx5RJYcGU5Qg9Z2ypjbS.html Bronze Age playlist: ua-cam.com/video/GalZLoTeU74/v-deo.html
You should be teaching ancient history at Oxford. Seriously. Your hypotheses are absolutely brilliant. Your dissertations are precise, well referenced, and should be part of mainstream scholarship debate. Well done !!!
As always good job. Bronze Age subjects? Just about any cutting edge topic on the steppe cultures or the "Hittites" & the related Luwians. Where the bleep did they come from? PIE speakers suddenly appear in the historical record ca 19 c BCE amongst speakers of nonPUE languages or so & a few centuries later they are sacking cities & carrying off the others' gods (idols).
I would be really interested on your take of the North American Clovis Point neolithic culture and how it is related or if it is related to Europeans? My understanding after all these years and my hypothesis is the Clovis spear points seem to be related and a direct technological progression from European stone age spear points and archaeology in some cases seems to point out that the spear point technology spread from East to West in North America, counter to the Siberian migration theory. I hypothesize that a European culture crossed during an ice age by moving along the Ice sheets and from island to island across the North Atlantic while the sea levels were lower. Then got mostly wiped out when the Comets hit the ice sheets in Canada. There was a discovery of a very old burial ground or mass grave off the coast of Florida with European DNA that dates to just after the Ice Age ended. This also coincides with the loss of the great ice age beasts across North America. Would love for you to tackle this topic. I always want to expand my knowledge or at least compare it to others so I can reassess my structure of thinking in regards to the old standard paradigms. Thanks, Chris
@@christophercripps7639 yes I am fascinated by that period, by the Hittites and Luwians. I will be researching it in detail in future but not for a while yet.
My friend was telling me about this old medieval french lemonade made with oranges recipe that he found and was talking about how the sheer amount of people in the french county that made most of the lemonade survived better then most of europe because they constantly threw the lemon and orange peels all over but the lemon peels drives off the bugs because of the citric acid or some such sciency reason
Citric acid is indeed antibacterial; as is vinegar; they are common in DIY household cleaners (and even in hospitals...I work in an ER and we've used citric acid-soaked cleaning wipes). I clean my reptiles' cages and rinse fruit & vegetables with a water-vinegar mix I keep in a spray bottle. You can also add vinegar or lemon juice to laundry during the second rinse, and de-grease your appliances with them. AND vinegar can replace eggs in some baked goods recipes without affecting the taste. Citric acid and vinegar are basically magic, is what I'm saying.
@@alessandrogini5283 Some! I've absorbed quite a bit from the ER (I'm in an admin position, but I have patient contact/work alongside the clinical staff). I'm a licensed massage therapist, which in my state requires study of anatomy/physiology/kinesiology/pathology...we used to joke that the year it takes to get your first certification was like your first year of med school. And, unfortunately, I also live with OCD, and for awhile there I was absolutely petrified of spreading diseases and allergens. So I did a lot of research for a lot of hours about cleaning agents. The OCD is under control now, thank God, but I do still retain a lot of the information I found then 🤗
@@lunettasuziejewel2080 I agree with the addition of acidic solutions in cleaning for sure. It's also possible that the benefits of citric in particular include fighting off scurvy. The acids also act as natural food preservatives (think ceviche). I'm also a big advocate of apple cider vinegar (ACV) with live cultures, such as "Braggs" with "The Mother", just 'magical' for sure!! 🤩
Not a lot of people know this, but there was an outbreak of the plague (Yersinia Pestis) in Los Angeles about 100 years ago. It happened in a poor neighborhood that was overcrowded with very old houses. The neighborhood was quarantined and the disease ran its course. There was only one survivor - a boy about a year and a half old. After everyone had passed away, the city burned the whole neighborhood to the ground.
It’s sick to think that despite the demise and decline of our ancestors, YOU are still here. Our ancestors pushed through and now we are here. Pretty incredible
Plagues have always fascinated me since I was a kid, the concept of an invisible force passing through a society and killing off a good chunk of the population captures my imagination. Must have been terrifying for people who didn't understand what bacterial/viral infection was, look how people have reacted to the one doing the rounds at the minute which is barely a ripple compared to the megatsunami that was the black death or the plague of Justinian. If so many people are so frightened now of a relatively benign disease that we understand how to treat and how it spreads, what must have gone through the minds of our ancestors as their friends and family keeled over in droves?
@@DanDavisHistory I have often said that antibiotic resistance in microbes proves the theory of evolution or the malevolence of the Supreme Being. Not really a third alternative.
What worries me is it's only a matter of time we see something like it again and we as a nation are in no way ready for such. People are more concerned with personal freedom to not wear a mask. Heck right now they are trying to pass laws to prevent mask mandates. Nevermind if Corona was going on back then the death toll would be far higher and if the black death came today the death toll would be much lower than back then. Medical advances are a major difference.
4 years i have bugs in my bed and i don't know what to do. last winter i bought a steam cleaner and i could get rid of the bugs. in the summer is not so simple, i have to steam the bed 2-3 times a week. sometimes i can't sleep
You do need to heat your entire home, either exterminator or self but I suffered them for a year trying all kinds of ways and finally had to give in and pay the pest control their charge. Got em again and they only got into one room for a few days, called exterminators and it was much less as they only had to treat my room. Once I found out where I was picking them up from I refused to go back. The fist one came from an unhygienic visitor of my roommates whome I refused to let back on the property through threat of trespassing. The second was one of my job sites that has since been cleansed of bugs
One of the hardest things to do as a historian is keeping the present day from coloring interpretation of poorly/not recorded events/behaviors. I've only met a handful of historians that can even sort of manage it. Unfortunately the stronger your intrests/concerns the more they'll leak in. That, coupled with most of us having a latent desire to not be wrong, leads to some really stupid conflicts in the field. I applaud this video as it manages to present the few facts available and presents possible explanations without backing one or two explanations as fact.
I was thinking about that exact aspect but I couldn't think of a good way to word it. I was thinking that being able to see your own biases and influences of your own time would be difficult because it's such a subtle thing. I'm having trouble wording a lot of things lately - I'm wondering if I have the plague of our time and it's making my mind foggy lol...
In examining collapse of civilisations the simple answer is that nothing lasts forever, including empires. Every empire in history has believed itself to be immortal. Hubris as denial of death. A lesson for the American Empire too and our present civilisation. Another dark age will come because nothing lasts forever.
how exactly could you keep bias from affecting your work as a historian, when even just choosing which things to investigate are a result of and a compounding factor of bias?
burning the house down and building a new one sounds like a kind of purification ritual, done for probably several reasons, including the ones you mentioned. a new building is less likely to have collected mold and disease, and may just be more structurally sound than the previous construction, as they learned new building techniques.
Yes, like most human cultural activities there were probably multiple reasons for doing it. But their houses didn't really change in design for something like a thousand years. The Cucuteni-Trypillia houses were apparently extremely important, foundational really, to their society.
This is really , really good channel. I hope you reach million subs not just because you deserve it but because people also deserve this kind of videos and knowledge. Sorry for broken english, greetings from Serbia. : )
Your English is nearly perfect, just add the necessary articles and you’re there. So, add “a” before really and million, and “the” before broken. This is one of the odd features of English, frequently using the definite (the) and indefinite (a) articles, most languages don’t have this.
As a kid I watched the Stephen King's "The Stand". (The 1994 TV miniseries). I was way too young for it. Man, that story terrified me. It looks like this discovery could easily be turned into a ancient version of that story.
UA-cam recommended this video to me while watching a popular history video so, hopefully that means you’ll be seeing an influx of subscribers! You deserve them with how fascinating and thoroughly researched your subjects are. Thank you for your hard work and, if it’s any encouragement, you have at least one new sub now.
It was probably mentioned earlier, but your point on current events influencing historiography of an ancient culture was so well put. Just like now, events unfolded thousands of years ago in the ways they did because of multiple reasons. Thank you for calling that out, because it’s such an easy trap to fall into when we analyze the past.
I honestly wish more authors would do this, can you imagine all the information they've gathered? Storytelling is a practice as old as humans themselves, they are our teachers who devoted themselves to preserving and retelling stories. Sure it may not all be that way in 2021, but videos and channels like this I feel give homage to that concept 💯💕 Side note: I have not heard of this author or his works, this randomly popped up in my feed. I'm glad it did tho, I'm now very curious to explore his novels!
It reminded me of the famous Douglas Adams quote "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
Technically, the end of serfdom in Western Europe was kind of a bad thing for Eastern Europe ..... or rather a bad thing for it's peasants but an excellent news for the nobility. Basically, a lot of western Europe had a sudden need for agricultural goods as the social mobility increased and that meant that Eastern Europe (basically just Poland and Russia) had a strengthening of their own serfdom during the early modern era to cover for this need and make some big bank (and considering that Poland was prior to that one of the freest countries, that was a downgrade, granted it was way less harsh than in Russia, but the russian serfs already had it bad to begin with, it just became worse). So it depends from your perspective really
The Black Death put an end to the crusades/put an end to high rents and low wages. For a couple of generations at least Pre plague Europe/ Eurasia was overpop[ulated . It took 200 years for the population to recover to the pre plague levels. Enough said. .
@@josephhenry9924 A bit of revisionist History huh? The great European Plague started 1347 , in ended around the 1350's. The great plague of London was around 1346 to 1352. The Crusades predated (about 1150) , and went waaayy past 1352 .. "16th century .... The Habsburgs, French, Spanish and Venetians and Ottomans all signed treaties. Francis I of France allied with all quarters, including from German Protestant princes and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ... The Habsburgs, French, Spanish and Venetians and Ottomans all signed treaties. Francis I of France allied with all quarters, including from German Protestant princes and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent... Anti-Christian crusading declined in the 15th century, the exceptions were the six failed crusades against the religiously radical Hussites in Bohemia and attacks on the Waldensians in Savoy"
Yes, and one catastrophy often had a domino effect, plague caused famine, famine caused toppling of elites, conflict and the end of established religions/societal bonds.
From what i understand, the malnutrition/famine causes a weak immunesystem that makes people more suseptible to disease so it spread easier. And failed harvests may also cause migration of large(r) groups of people, which would also spread diseases.
Absolutely fascinating video, and beautifully explained. The brief discussion of the Bronze Age collapse at 12:20 ish totally nails it and should be required listening for anyone interested in perspectives on ancient history!
@@sophiawilson8696 I think the big eruption of Thera was around 1600BCE (this massively affected the Minoan civilisation). The Bronze Age collapse was much later (c. 1100BCE)
It’s always intrigued me how a plague usually plays a large part in the fall of kingdoms and cultures. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas had Smallpox. Thank you for bringing to light what a huge role Pestis has played in steering our course 🙏🏽
Found this several years later. I have no idea if you still check the comments, but I found it interesting that when talking about current times affecting the veiw of the decline of the bronze age, you are looking at disease after a modern plague.
The Trypillia people burning their houses down to sanitize their communities of pests and diseases is fascinating. Reminds me of how the Romani people religiously took baths with running water. Sometimes we just kind of stumbled on the right answers to staying healthy.
As Ukrainians we spend so many years learning the history of Tripillya bc up until this day so many people keep on finding things in their backyards or when building houses, yet we were never taught anything about the first plague happening in that time, so bezare to revisit this topic now as an adult. What I can say about the culture is that although cities lasted for some time the land indeed ran out of recourses so they moved quite often and left stuff behind all the time, not to mention the rotting “haty” since so much of Ukraine’s land has torf in it that causes fires and rots houses so they kept moving. Also to this day so many people live in haty of clay
It's a wonder, modern civilization ever developed, isn't it? I mean, surviving would have been hard enough, as it it...if you add in warfare and horrific diseases like this...it's pretty marvelous, we even survived as a species, never mind managed to built large cities and invent technologies.
Civilization nearly sprouted so many different times. It took a good long while before it finally took hold. Honestly, I've come around to the opinion that it was a pretty tough sell at the time. Farmers had less free time than hunter gatherers or nomadic pastoralists, had a less varied diet of lower nutritional quality, performed repetitive straining backbreaking labor that ruined their bodies, needed to form settlements for protection (sowing fields was putting a target on your back), and *then* had to deal with the constant attacks as well as disease. The only people who really stood to benefit were the leadership, and that group is invariably small. Religious sites like Göbekli Tepe, which predate complex civilization, coupled with the fact that the quality of life would be decreased for the majority of any founding population (and for many subsequent generations) leads me to believe that religion was probably the primary organizing factor for proto-civilization. If they're not benefiting in this life, it's probably in the next. It's also the primary method of societal organization historically (even today), so it's not surprising that it started that way.
It only took like what...300,000 years? Though admittedly, things speeded up a bit once we out of the ice age(s). I often think there may have been some serious starts in places that have been deep underwater since the great thaw. After all, even today, most of humanity still lives fairly near the shores.
Actually, many anthropologists think the difficulties posed by rapidly changing environments post-Ice Age *caused* the rise of denser settlements and wider trade networks. As previously abundant and culturally important resources became scarce, tribes had to either migrate or trade: causing the rise of multi-tribe confederations that would eventually become proto-states.
If you think about it really hard... God came from Yahweh, and Yahweh is an Italic/Germanic thunder & lightning god whose pantheon dwindled down until it was just him (imo sounds like a mixture of Proto-Indo-European stuff and zoroastrianism) Basically, what I'm sayin is, God is also Zeus and/or Thor ^~^
Thank you from a microbiologist. Thank you for bringing up the awareness about defying moments in history. We are living through another turning point in history. People should be aware that the world we used to live in doesn’t exists. And either a tiny bacterium or a tiny virus changed our perception of the world many times. And it is happening again.
This is great, I have never heard of the trypillian civilization, thank you for introducing me to it. I will certainly be watching more of your great videos.
Absolutely brilliant video like always. I'm very happy you brought up, towards the end, how modern historians project onto history 'causes' and effects. To sya it is intentional or not does not matter, but like you said it teaches us as much about 'now' as it does 'then.' Keep the videos coming!:)
@@DanDavisHistory You made posed a question to the audience a couple of days earlier about the cause of the decline and migration of the eastern step people. What was the outcome? If memory serves me well ‘Climate change’ was leading in the pole when I clicked.
A joke that has a kernel of truth, bare with me: A man, a proud alumnus of a University returns to his Alma Mater for function with his daughter who is now a Freshman at the same school. At the function he sees his old History Professor and engages him in conversation: "Dr X so glad to see you, you know my daughter just took you FR survey History class and she showed me her Final... I must admit I was a bit shocked to see that 25 yrs later the questions are EXACTLY the same as the ones you used when I took the course all those years ago." The Professor replied with a wry smile, "Yes, that is true, but the answers have all changed." (rimshot)...
Thank you for a very interesting video! The burning of the neolithic houses interests me. I studied archaeology some years ago (I live in Sweden) and visited the site where one of these burned villages had been. I don't remember how many years our mentor said there were between burnings, but I seem to remember that it was perhaps every ten to twenty years. The theory then was that the house was burned partly to get rid of vermin and partly for agricultural reasons. (Getting rid of disease is a good idea, but did they really understand how disease spread and that it was a good thing to burn the house?) The new house was then built a few meters away from the burned area, and the burned ground became the new field where seeds were planted. The potassium in the ashes made the earth more nutritious for the plants. Excavation at the site had shown a pattern of the house being rebuilt again and again in a circle. This was in the south of Sweden, in Småland.
Although steptomycin can knock the mortality rate down to 10 percent or so, it is fearsome even today: imagine historical times when nobody knew the cause or how to treat it.
It must have been terrifying and confusing. That said, I expect they did have explanations that satisfied them to some extent. They would have understand that this was the work of a powerful god and/or was cosmic punishment for their society not living properly or something else quite specific.
@@DanDavisHistory I do like how science is revealing details of their lives and communities. We may not know the stories they told about themselves, but we can understand, remember and honour what they went through. Just like this!
Captivating from start to finish. You earned a new subscriber my man. What a concise and comprehensible video to explain sth so potentially complicated. Love it
Not sure how I missed this a year ago but it was a treat to get to watch it just now ♡ This one tied so many of your other videos together, it was kind of crazy As always, keep up the good work
It has been suggested that the replacement of the black rat (rattus rattus) which harbored the flea species that carry Yesinia Pestis by the larger and more aggressive brown rat (rattus norvicus) that harbors different flea species that don't carry the plague pathogen had some effect on the reduction of the plague in Europe.
Possible. But the hard DNA mutational anzlysis points to an attenuation of the yrsenia pestis bacterium itself -- that is, it became less contageous and/or less lethal over the centuries. Which sounds an unlikely strategy! But diseases that are too virulent cancel themselves out (see: early ebola). Add to that selective resistance in populations, plus cultural mitigation measures. Most fatal pandemics follow a similar growth curve. Syphilis, smallpox, typhoid....
@@robertmcgovern8850 this is so, but remember. Yersinia has an animal species that it is endemic to (several in fact) and as such most of the evolutionary pressure is for it to be most easily passed on and less virulent for THAT species, not humans.
Thank you for Sharing.You also have a nice voice and delivery. Im intetested in learning about this sort of History,so its great to listen to you. Thank you.
Interesting and thanks for not interjecting current thinking into history as many do. History is best described from the writings or knowledge from the actual time when it was happening by those who lived in it. The rest is a half educated guess. Well done !!
In my studies of Norwegian genealogies of my mother, there is a province/county near Telemark, where it is named Treungen. In the aftermath of the Black Death, when 8 million people were reduced down to 125,000, ... Norway only regained its repopulation back up to 8 million at the time of Norwegian people migrating to the Americas in the late 1870s, ... in this fylke, the searchers only found 3 young ones, thus the name. An entire fylke of people were wiped out.
Great video :) thank you. My personal take away of the decline is as you stated, multiple causes. The drop in the male population to me is a sign of warfare and often after warring in distant countries, diseases often spreads.
Some deseases are gender specific or more dangerous to one gender than the other, and other times it's an ailment caused during hunting (such as poisoned water drank on the go), so it doesn't always have to be warfare.
Interesting video, thanks for posting. If plague really did wipe out the Neolithic population (which as you state could be one factor among many, and an unlikely one) then the situation in Neolithic Europe would've been similar to the one in Mesoamerica in the 16th century. It seems that diseases brought by the Spanish had travelled ahead of them, so that when the Conquistadors arrived in certain areas the population had already been decimated or completely wiped out by disease.
Awesome video. I think it was the same in the 6th century UK - the plague of Justinian killed off so many of the locals that the incomers were essentially moving into almost deserted lands. Thats why we have very little evidence of conflict. Might also explain why they eventuaaly only met resistance in the less populated western lands - hence the Arthur legends etc
Thank you for saying that our interpretations of cause and effect often say as much about us and the times we live in as it does about past peoples. I've noticed that, even when trying to explain modern occurrences, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, et cetera will allow their own prejudices and obsessions to color their interpretations of what happened. The truth is, most events are caused by a combination of many forces, not just one.
Did you realise that the last known cases of bubonic plague in England occurred at a little hamlet near Ipswich, Suffolk in 1918! Yes, just over 100 years ago. I believe 1 person died, but several others were very ill. This place is within walking distance of where my sister lives. Love your wonderful historic videos.
Y. Pestis, an old "companion" of humanity. I always marvel how sone scholars want to promote THE (1 & only) CAUSE of such&such event. In reality, many airline crashes are often the end result of a chain of causalities each of which in of itself lead to the crash but together do. Likewise, the Bronze Age or neolithic collapse likewise are the result of cumulative effects of events each if which alone would not have lead to collapse. Over population + drought (or other climatic variation) + Y Pestis were too much.
@@emsnewssupkis6453 Not 100% but it's a good approximation yes. A reasonable correlation between those is that this drop in temperature (generally a sudden one like after a terrific volcanic eruption) leads to widespread crop failures that lead to famines and from there on the immune system is weakened and the small pests that normally survive off of humans are bundled together more closely and come closer to humans to search for food and well ...... you have a recipe for disaster. Not all pandemics start like that, but for the deadliest ones it seems to be a pretty recurring pattern (best example of that is the Justinian plague)
@@sephikong8323 Volcanic eruptions cause short cold cycles but the 300 year long weather cycles are quite real and cold 300 year cycles are notorious for causing massive disease events, this culls the human population which grew greatly during the preceding warm cycles.
@@emsnewssupkis6453 I know this, I am mostly talking about the sudden and extremely deadly but relatively short lived pandemics like we saw in the fifth and fourteenth century, those come extremely suddenly and disappear in a few years (though the Plague had some ripples throughout the Little Ice Age yes, bit it was nothing like the original one, these outbreaks were all limited in size and can't really be compared to the explosive outbreaks like the aforementioned ones which only seem to happen during very particular and sudden circumstances like a very big Volcqnic eruption that lowers the global temperatures for a few years)
@@emsnewssupkis6453 I wonder how the combination of cold, the resultant poor harvests and malnutrition wouldn't have set the stage for plague. In addition I wonder if the dead bodies left by warfare would also been an influence, i.e after the Mongol invasion in the 12th-13th centuries? It does seem as though the herding cultures spend thousands of years in close proximity to their animals without getting sick, building a natural immunity?
Thank you, excellent as always, and sorry for giving you shit in your poll earlier. I would very much lean toward a very slight increase in the average low temperature in the region as a way to increase human movement and productivity, as well as increased survival of Y pestis. A slight shift of a single variable is like the proverbial lost horsehoe nail that felled a kingdom, wide ranging consequences can cascade from small changes applied in the right time and place.
Thank you for saying "bacterium" when it's singular, and not "bacteria", which is plural. I want you to know it didn't go unnoticed and is much appreciated : )
Is it plausible that the Trypillian towns provided the right conditions for the plague to jump from livestock to humans? As I understand it, urban conditions make this far more probable given the level of human-animal contact in such scenarios, and most deadly epidemics come from animals originally IIRC.
Yeah you're right and they were dependent on cattle and also farmed pigs. It's been a few days since I read the studies but I think the ancestor of Y.pestis is found in more ancient samples on the steppe suggesting that's where it evolved into the plague. I'll have to double check but they do show their reasoning in the study. You're right tho, it's urban conditions that cause the rapid evolution into disease.
Don't suppose ticks and other disease vectors from that time period were any different to the many varieties we now know today. If it can do so now, possibly it was the same then. Especially since more animals were warm blooded at that point.
@@DanDavisHistory If that’s the case, and I could be grasping at straws here, could it explain why the steppe herding Scythians held a taboo against pigs?
Did they have a taboo against pigs? Well pig rearing is only possible for settled peoples. I know you get swineherds but you can't herd pigs across the steppes.
The Native Americans used to burn their houses - and all their clothing - when hantavirus plagues showed up among them. There was a saying among, I think, the Navajo - it might have been the Hopi, but iirc Navajo - that if a mouse crawled across your clothes, you must immediately burn those clothes. So that makes sense to me, the burning of the houses during the neolithic.
Just wanted to mention, some pneumonic plague strains can actually kill you in as little as 24 hours in the right conditions (such as being stressed, elderly, or a child.) Usually it takes closer to three days though, as the video said.
Just found your channel by accident, quite happy that i did.. hope you get more subs and views.. this is the kind of content that deserves millions in views and subscriptions.. sadly that is not the case but every sub and view helps in my opinion..
The most mysterious periods of time, that I've only recently heard of, and you write novels based in them with your knowledge of the workings of these cultures. Sounds at least as interesting as Fatherland, and I will give it a look. Great Video, and thank you.
I am now finding out that you are a novelist. How fascinating! I will be checking out your work as soon as I can. I thoroughly enjoy your videos in particular, the one about the rite of passage of The Indo Europeans.
Loved the video. Thanks for pointing out that reality is complex and causes tend to be multiple. Like maybe it was not even a single plague, maybe the steppe herders had also zoonotic illnesses gotten from horses that EEF had no defense against. May I interest you in the Iberian Neolithic-Chalcolithic? Los Millares, probably the first western european civilization, demands your love! Or the amazing Neolithic boats of Laja Alta. Or the burning question that Archeogenetics has gifted spanish scholars: In 2019 it was discovered that the iberians, speakers of a non indoeuropean language, had in fact steppe ancestry. Most of their male lineages had that origin. Their culture was also pretty horse-centric. So... How did that happen?.
Great video. It's this first I've watched from this channel. I love the topic. I love that you research it so thoroughly. One of my favorite genres to read is historical fiction, but it has to be accurate. I will be buying your books! Thank you!
Feels like it may have been spread between these neighboring farmer cultures via grain trading. Wheat and barley are easy to transport, but hard to keep infected rats out of. The cucuteni-trypillians may have had horrible rat infestations which spread to their neighbors through exchanging other goods for grain shipments.
Glad I found your videos. I’ve always had a strong interest in history of all types, and these videos fill in some of the gaps from books I’ve read over the past 50 years. Thank you!
No doubt, as you said, there were probably multiple reasons. Perhaps climate change led to food shortages, conflict, immune system stress, then Y. pestis decided it was party time.
Always surprised to find a Video Maker who has an IQ over 20 lately ... subbed > I would like to see more about = Rickettsia prowazekii, as the vaccine almost killed me at 5 - I had a temp of 105.6 ...F
I recall from medieval times they put bundles of brushwood on the floor and even slept on it. Not changing it out for years or even forever. Does not seem to be a healthy thing to me.
Much like sawdust on the floor of saloons and taverns, rushes were supposed to be periodically swept out. I suppose that some households were either too lazy to go to the trouble, or were too poor to afford it.
@@baraxor I read it was bundles of tied together brushwood, maybe 2 to 4 inches thick on a stomped clay-ground. Stayed there for years. Quite warm and dry to sit and sleep on and also relatively soft. Unfortunately I can not find something to quote for that. I hope my memory is not playing a prank on me. In my area later there were bigger houses. On one head end were the sleeping rooms of the owners and children. then left and right the hands. With a wooden floor over some foot of empty space. Then a dividing wall, then kitchen, older versions with a firehole in the ground and a spark catcher over it. Then left and right at the side walls room for the cattle. Later versions had room for the hands on top of the cattle and also storage room for hay and harvest. the smoke from the kitchen was disinfecting the thatched roof over all of it, in later centuries they used separated kitchen with hearth and chimney. all the ground except the sleeping area was stomped clay. there were different versions of course. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German_house The house of an aunt of mine was a late version of that from about 1800. The living area already renovated two steps up with stone floor and roof tiles on top of everything. I remember i helped them hauling hay bricks from a wagon through a hole up to the hayloft above the horses to the left and right using a big fork. Wow, that was exhausting. My grandfathers house from 1925 was a craftsmans house and lot. one basement room for storage. The rest had double brick walls in the sand with isolation gap and wooden planks half a meter above sand. The wooden floor was covered with linoleum.
If you enjoy the video please hit "like" as it really helps me out! Let me know what other Neolithic and Bronze Age subjects you would like covered.
Here are links to the other videos I referenced:
Cucuteni-Trypillia culture: ua-cam.com/video/Bk2Qbf1YQbI/v-deo.html
Neolithic Britain: ua-cam.com/video/ZuZLxWvv5vg/v-deo.html
Funnelbeaker culture: ua-cam.com/video/iJYvhf0VVi0/v-deo.html
Pitted Ware culture: ua-cam.com/video/_rspqObP2yg/v-deo.html
The First Horse Riders: ua-cam.com/video/AMHqp0M0T4Q/v-deo.html
Neolithic playlist: ua-cam.com/play/PLUyGT3KDxwC-oYx5RJYcGU5Qg9Z2ypjbS.html
Bronze Age playlist: ua-cam.com/video/GalZLoTeU74/v-deo.html
You should be teaching ancient history at Oxford. Seriously. Your hypotheses are absolutely brilliant. Your dissertations are precise, well referenced, and should be part of mainstream scholarship debate. Well done !!!
As always good job. Bronze Age subjects? Just about any cutting edge topic on the steppe cultures or the "Hittites" & the related Luwians. Where the bleep did they come from? PIE speakers suddenly appear in the historical record ca 19 c BCE amongst speakers of nonPUE languages or so & a few centuries later they are sacking cities & carrying off the others' gods (idols).
Well done and thanks for doing all this hard work. Chris
I would be really interested on your take of the North American Clovis Point neolithic culture and how it is related or if it is related to Europeans? My understanding after all these years and my hypothesis is the Clovis spear points seem to be related and a direct technological progression from European stone age spear points and archaeology in some cases seems to point out that the spear point technology spread from East to West in North America, counter to the Siberian migration theory. I hypothesize that a European culture crossed during an ice age by moving along the Ice sheets and from island to island across the North Atlantic while the sea levels were lower. Then got mostly wiped out when the Comets hit the ice sheets in Canada. There was a discovery of a very old burial ground or mass grave off the coast of Florida with European DNA that dates to just after the Ice Age ended. This also coincides with the loss of the great ice age beasts across North America. Would love for you to tackle this topic. I always want to expand my knowledge or at least compare it to others so I can reassess my structure of thinking in regards to the old standard paradigms. Thanks, Chris
@@christophercripps7639 yes I am fascinated by that period, by the Hittites and Luwians. I will be researching it in detail in future but not for a while yet.
My friend was telling me about this old medieval french lemonade made with oranges recipe that he found and was talking about how the sheer amount of people in the french county that made most of the lemonade survived better then most of europe because they constantly threw the lemon and orange peels all over but the lemon peels drives off the bugs because of the citric acid or some such sciency reason
Citric acid is indeed antibacterial; as is vinegar; they are common in DIY household cleaners (and even in hospitals...I work in an ER and we've used citric acid-soaked cleaning wipes).
I clean my reptiles' cages and rinse fruit & vegetables with a water-vinegar mix I keep in a spray bottle. You can also add vinegar or lemon juice to laundry during the second rinse, and de-grease your appliances with them. AND vinegar can replace eggs in some baked goods recipes without affecting the taste.
Citric acid and vinegar are basically magic, is what I'm saying.
@@lunettasuziejewel2080 do you have medical knowledge?
@@alessandrogini5283 Some! I've absorbed quite a bit from the ER (I'm in an admin position, but I have patient contact/work alongside the clinical staff). I'm a licensed massage therapist, which in my state requires study of anatomy/physiology/kinesiology/pathology...we used to joke that the year it takes to get your first certification was like your first year of med school.
And, unfortunately, I also live with OCD, and for awhile there I was absolutely petrified of spreading diseases and allergens. So I did a lot of research for a lot of hours about cleaning agents. The OCD is under control now, thank God, but I do still retain a lot of the information I found then 🤗
@@lunettasuziejewel2080 what is OCD?
@@lunettasuziejewel2080 I agree with the addition of acidic solutions in cleaning for sure. It's also possible that the benefits of citric in particular include fighting off scurvy. The acids also act as natural food preservatives (think ceviche). I'm also a big advocate of apple cider vinegar (ACV) with live cultures, such as "Braggs" with "The Mother", just 'magical' for sure!! 🤩
Not a lot of people know this, but there was an outbreak of the plague (Yersinia Pestis) in Los Angeles about 100 years ago. It happened in a poor neighborhood that was overcrowded with very old houses. The neighborhood was quarantined and the disease ran its course. There was only one survivor - a boy about a year and a half old. After everyone had passed away, the city burned the whole neighborhood to the ground.
True nightmare fuel, especially as someone with health/disease anxiety🫥😵
Praise be to the algorithm that has blessed us with this recommendation
Yep same, damn UA-cam hiding this stuff from me even when I search for it
Amen! This channel is freaking phenomenal.
Lol yesssss
Shame for not being subscribed!
Same algorithms that brain wash people 🙄 subscribe
It’s sick to think that despite the demise and decline of our ancestors, YOU are still here. Our ancestors pushed through and now we are here. Pretty incredible
Plagues have always fascinated me since I was a kid, the concept of an invisible force passing through a society and killing off a good chunk of the population captures my imagination. Must have been terrifying for people who didn't understand what bacterial/viral infection was, look how people have reacted to the one doing the rounds at the minute which is barely a ripple compared to the megatsunami that was the black death or the plague of Justinian. If so many people are so frightened now of a relatively benign disease that we understand how to treat and how it spreads, what must have gone through the minds of our ancestors as their friends and family keeled over in droves?
It's clearly the will of the gods, what else could it be?
@@DanDavisHistory I have often said that antibiotic resistance in microbes proves the theory of evolution or the malevolence of the Supreme Being. Not really a third alternative.
@@DanDavisHistory Lets sacrifice somebody to apease them!
Indeed I have already somebody in mind :)
@@dbmail545 sure there are
What worries me is it's only a matter of time we see something like it again and we as a nation are in no way ready for such. People are more concerned with personal freedom to not wear a mask. Heck right now they are trying to pass laws to prevent mask mandates.
Nevermind if Corona was going on back then the death toll would be far higher and if the black death came today the death toll would be much lower than back then. Medical advances are a major difference.
All it takes is a breakout of something as simple as "bed bugs" to make you want to burn-down your house.....
The best treatment heat put clothing in dryer and if it winter put things outside. Heat and Cold kills Bed bugs.
😂
4 years i have bugs in my bed and i don't know what to do. last winter i bought a steam cleaner and i could get rid of the bugs. in the summer is not so simple, i have to steam the bed 2-3 times a week. sometimes i can't sleep
@@erdelegy how bad was that electric bill? I'm sure it was a lot better than bed bugs though.
You do need to heat your entire home, either exterminator or self but I suffered them for a year trying all kinds of ways and finally had to give in and pay the pest control their charge. Got em again and they only got into one room for a few days, called exterminators and it was much less as they only had to treat my room. Once I found out where I was picking them up from I refused to go back. The fist one came from an unhygienic visitor of my roommates whome I refused to let back on the property through threat of trespassing. The second was one of my job sites that has since been cleansed of bugs
One of the hardest things to do as a historian is keeping the present day from coloring interpretation of poorly/not recorded events/behaviors. I've only met a handful of historians that can even sort of manage it.
Unfortunately the stronger your intrests/concerns the more they'll leak in. That, coupled with most of us having a latent desire to not be wrong, leads to some really stupid conflicts in the field.
I applaud this video as it manages to present the few facts available and presents possible explanations without backing one or two explanations as fact.
Confirmation Bias
@@loturzelrestaurant please speak with your psychiatrist about upping your dosage.
I was thinking about that exact aspect but I couldn't think of a good way to word it. I was thinking that being able to see your own biases and influences of your own time would be difficult because it's such a subtle thing. I'm having trouble wording a lot of things lately - I'm wondering if I have the plague of our time and it's making my mind foggy lol...
In examining collapse of civilisations the simple answer is that nothing lasts forever, including empires. Every empire in history has believed itself to be immortal. Hubris as denial of death. A lesson for the American Empire too and our present civilisation. Another dark age will come because nothing lasts forever.
how exactly could you keep bias from affecting your work as a historian, when even just choosing which things to investigate are a result of and a compounding factor of bias?
burning the house down and building a new one sounds like a kind of purification ritual, done for probably several reasons, including the ones you mentioned. a new building is less likely to have collected mold and disease, and may just be more structurally sound than the previous construction, as they learned new building techniques.
Yes, like most human cultural activities there were probably multiple reasons for doing it. But their houses didn't really change in design for something like a thousand years. The Cucuteni-Trypillia houses were apparently extremely important, foundational really, to their society.
I think that was the Talking Heads culture
wood rots too.
Maybe an insurance fraud?
@@barkershill DB Cooper was there
This is really , really good channel. I hope you reach million subs not just because you deserve it but because people also deserve this kind of videos and knowledge. Sorry for broken english, greetings from Serbia. : )
Thank you so much. Your English is excellent.
I agree ❤️
I hope you get 1 million trillion likes. Not because you deserve it but because that would be funny and low key ironic.
@@DanDavisHistory let's see if you remember us when your swimming in that UA-cam money💸
Your English is nearly perfect, just add the necessary articles and you’re there. So, add “a” before really and million, and “the” before broken. This is one of the odd features of English, frequently using the definite (the) and indefinite (a) articles, most languages don’t have this.
As a kid I watched the Stephen King's "The Stand". (The 1994 TV miniseries). I was way too young for it. Man, that story terrified me. It looks like this discovery could easily be turned into a ancient version of that story.
One of my favorite books
UA-cam recommended this video to me while watching a popular history video so, hopefully that means you’ll be seeing an influx of subscribers! You deserve them with how fascinating and thoroughly researched your subjects are. Thank you for your hard work and, if it’s any encouragement, you have at least one new sub now.
Thank you very much.
The "Western Steppe Herders like the Yamnaya and related groups" :: were they the people who brought the Common Indo-European language into Europe?
Probably yes.
It was probably mentioned earlier, but your point on current events influencing historiography of an ancient culture was so well put. Just like now, events unfolded thousands of years ago in the ways they did because of multiple reasons. Thank you for calling that out, because it’s such an easy trap to fall into when we analyze the past.
I honestly wish more authors would do this, can you imagine all the information they've gathered? Storytelling is a practice as old as humans themselves, they are our teachers who devoted themselves to preserving and retelling stories. Sure it may not all be that way in 2021, but videos and channels like this I feel give homage to that concept 💯💕
Side note: I have not heard of this author or his works, this randomly popped up in my feed. I'm glad it did tho, I'm now very curious to explore his novels!
Black Death linked to the end of serfdom..."it's got a lot to answer for" makes it sound like the end of serfdom was a bad thing.
It reminded me of the famous Douglas Adams quote
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
@@dnomyarnostaw I thought the exact same thing lmao
Technically, the end of serfdom in Western Europe was kind of a bad thing for Eastern Europe ..... or rather a bad thing for it's peasants but an excellent news for the nobility. Basically, a lot of western Europe had a sudden need for agricultural goods as the social mobility increased and that meant that Eastern Europe (basically just Poland and Russia) had a strengthening of their own serfdom during the early modern era to cover for this need and make some big bank (and considering that Poland was prior to that one of the freest countries, that was a downgrade, granted it was way less harsh than in Russia, but the russian serfs already had it bad to begin with, it just became worse).
So it depends from your perspective really
The Black Death put an end to the crusades/put an end to high rents and low wages. For a couple of generations at least Pre plague Europe/ Eurasia was overpop[ulated . It took 200 years for the population to recover to the pre plague levels. Enough said. .
@@josephhenry9924 A bit of revisionist History huh?
The great European Plague started 1347 , in ended around the 1350's.
The great plague of London was around 1346 to 1352.
The Crusades predated (about 1150) , and went waaayy past 1352 ..
"16th century .... The Habsburgs, French, Spanish and Venetians and Ottomans all signed treaties. Francis I of France allied with all quarters, including from German Protestant princes and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ... The Habsburgs, French, Spanish and Venetians and Ottomans all signed treaties. Francis I of France allied with all quarters, including from German Protestant princes and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent... Anti-Christian crusading declined in the 15th century, the exceptions were the six failed crusades against the religiously radical Hussites in Bohemia and attacks on the Waldensians in Savoy"
Yes, and one catastrophy often had a domino effect, plague caused famine, famine caused toppling of elites, conflict and the end of established religions/societal bonds.
You're absolutely right.
From what i understand, the malnutrition/famine causes a weak immunesystem that makes people more suseptible to disease so it spread easier. And failed harvests may also cause migration of large(r) groups of people, which would also spread diseases.
Usually, wide-spread hunger is the worst thing that could happen to any ruler.
Absolutely fascinating video, and beautifully explained. The brief discussion of the Bronze Age collapse at 12:20 ish totally nails it and should be required listening for anyone interested in perspectives on ancient history!
Thank you very much.
The BRONZE Age Collapse was cause by the Threa Volcano.
@@sophiawilson8696 I think the big eruption of Thera was around 1600BCE (this massively affected the Minoan civilisation). The Bronze Age collapse was much later (c. 1100BCE)
Thing I like most about this is that you're getting in to the stuff behind your stuff. I always appreciate these kinda videos. Well done, Dan!
Wonderful, thank you.
It’s always intrigued me how a plague usually plays a large part in the fall of kingdoms and cultures. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas had Smallpox. Thank you for bringing to light what a huge role Pestis has played in steering our course 🙏🏽
Found this several years later. I have no idea if you still check the comments, but I found it interesting that when talking about current times affecting the veiw of the decline of the bronze age, you are looking at disease after a modern plague.
The Trypillia people burning their houses down to sanitize their communities of pests and diseases is fascinating.
Reminds me of how the Romani people religiously took baths with running water.
Sometimes we just kind of stumbled on the right answers to staying healthy.
As Ukrainians we spend so many years learning the history of Tripillya bc up until this day so many people keep on finding things in their backyards or when building houses, yet we were never taught anything about the first plague happening in that time, so bezare to revisit this topic now as an adult. What I can say about the culture is that although cities lasted for some time the land indeed ran out of recourses so they moved quite often and left stuff behind all the time, not to mention the rotting “haty” since so much of Ukraine’s land has torf in it that causes fires and rots houses so they kept moving. Also to this day so many people live in haty of clay
The stone age plague is quite resent discovery, so i don't wonder so much why you don't hear about it in schools yet.
It's a wonder, modern civilization ever developed, isn't it?
I mean, surviving would have been hard enough, as it it...if you add in warfare and horrific diseases like this...it's pretty marvelous, we even survived as a species, never mind managed to built large cities and invent technologies.
Civilization nearly sprouted so many different times. It took a good long while before it finally took hold. Honestly, I've come around to the opinion that it was a pretty tough sell at the time.
Farmers had less free time than hunter gatherers or nomadic pastoralists, had a less varied diet of lower nutritional quality, performed repetitive straining backbreaking labor that ruined their bodies, needed to form settlements for protection (sowing fields was putting a target on your back), and *then* had to deal with the constant attacks as well as disease. The only people who really stood to benefit were the leadership, and that group is invariably small.
Religious sites like Göbekli Tepe, which predate complex civilization, coupled with the fact that the quality of life would be decreased for the majority of any founding population (and for many subsequent generations) leads me to believe that religion was probably the primary organizing factor for proto-civilization. If they're not benefiting in this life, it's probably in the next. It's also the primary method of societal organization historically (even today), so it's not surprising that it started that way.
@@nobodynowhere6945 It's only gotten worse since then, honestly.
It only took like what...300,000 years? Though admittedly, things speeded up a bit once we out of the ice age(s). I often think there may have been some serious starts in places that have been deep underwater since the great thaw. After all, even today, most of humanity still lives fairly near the shores.
Actually, many anthropologists think the difficulties posed by rapidly changing environments post-Ice Age *caused* the rise of denser settlements and wider trade networks. As previously abundant and culturally important resources became scarce, tribes had to either migrate or trade: causing the rise of multi-tribe confederations that would eventually become proto-states.
Great video. Maybe the concept of the four horsemen of the apocalypse has deeper roots than we realise.
Sure, the stories in the Bible are all just ripped off from previous religions
@Simone Oh, IKR, he was a Jewish socialist just like Bernie Sanders 👍
If you think about it really hard...
God came from Yahweh, and Yahweh is an Italic/Germanic thunder & lightning god whose pantheon dwindled down until it was just him (imo sounds like a mixture of Proto-Indo-European stuff and zoroastrianism)
Basically, what I'm sayin is, God is also Zeus and/or Thor ^~^
@@baronzad2056 You've been over at Survive the Jive?
Yes, Yersinia pestis is a driving force behind our history. Great video!
Thank you!
Thank you from a microbiologist. Thank you for bringing up the awareness about defying moments in history. We are living through another turning point in history. People should be aware that the world we used to live in doesn’t exists. And either a tiny bacterium or a tiny virus changed our perception of the world many times. And it is happening again.
Fascinating as usual. The reality of these variations of the bubonic plague makes our current situation seem pale in comparison.
Thank you.
Our "current situation" isn't a significant cause for concern. 😒
@@Pynaegan it's just an opinion you don't have to choke on it
That's assuming no highly virulent variations evolve....
@@WWZenaDo Yes naturally.
This is great, I have never heard of the trypillian civilization, thank you for introducing me to it. I will certainly be watching more of your great videos.
Absolutely brilliant video like always. I'm very happy you brought up, towards the end, how modern historians project onto history 'causes' and effects. To sya it is intentional or not does not matter, but like you said it teaches us as much about 'now' as it does 'then.' Keep the videos coming!:)
Thank you very much indeed.
I agree it was a very well made point that I hadn't thought about before, which makes the study of history even more fascinating in my mind.
@@DanDavisHistory You made posed a question to the audience a couple of days earlier about the cause of the decline and migration of the eastern step people. What was the outcome? If memory serves me well ‘Climate change’ was leading in the pole when I clicked.
A joke that has a kernel of truth, bare with me:
A man, a proud alumnus of a University returns to his Alma Mater for function with his daughter who is now a Freshman at the same school. At the function he sees his old History Professor and engages him in conversation:
"Dr X so glad to see you, you know my daughter just took you FR survey History class and she showed me her Final... I must admit I was a bit shocked to see that 25 yrs later the questions are EXACTLY the same as the ones you used when I took the course all those years ago."
The Professor replied with a wry smile, "Yes, that is true, but the answers have all changed." (rimshot)...
Thank you for a very interesting video! The burning of the neolithic houses interests me. I studied archaeology some years ago (I live in Sweden) and visited the site where one of these burned villages had been. I don't remember how many years our mentor said there were between burnings, but I seem to remember that it was perhaps every ten to twenty years. The theory then was that the house was burned partly to get rid of vermin and partly for agricultural reasons. (Getting rid of disease is a good idea, but did they really understand how disease spread and that it was a good thing to burn the house?) The new house was then built a few meters away from the burned area, and the burned ground became the new field where seeds were planted. The potassium in the ashes made the earth more nutritious for the plants. Excavation at the site had shown a pattern of the house being rebuilt again and again in a circle. This was in the south of Sweden, in Småland.
Although steptomycin can knock the mortality rate down to 10 percent or so, it is fearsome even today: imagine historical times when nobody knew the cause or how to treat it.
It must have been terrifying and confusing. That said, I expect they did have explanations that satisfied them to some extent. They would have understand that this was the work of a powerful god and/or was cosmic punishment for their society not living properly or something else quite specific.
@@DanDavisHistory I do like how science is revealing details of their lives and communities. We may not know the stories they told about themselves, but we can understand, remember and honour what they went through. Just like this!
I love the map! Really make the understanding of topic easier
I'm so glad to hear that. Making the maps takes a lot of extra time so it's good to know people find them useful.
Captivating from start to finish. You earned a new subscriber my man. What a concise and comprehensible video to explain sth so potentially complicated. Love it
I just learned so much from this one little video. I have believed that making education also entertaining is the essence of teaching. Excellent job.
Not sure how I missed this a year ago but it was a treat to get to watch it just now ♡
This one tied so many of your other videos together, it was kind of crazy
As always, keep up the good work
It has been suggested that the replacement of the black rat (rattus rattus) which harbored the flea species that carry Yesinia Pestis by the larger and more aggressive brown rat (rattus norvicus) that harbors different flea species that don't carry the plague pathogen had some effect on the reduction of the plague in Europe.
Possible. But the hard DNA mutational anzlysis points to an attenuation of the yrsenia pestis bacterium itself -- that is, it became less contageous and/or less lethal over the centuries. Which sounds an unlikely strategy! But diseases that are too virulent cancel themselves out (see: early ebola). Add to that selective resistance in populations, plus cultural mitigation measures. Most fatal pandemics follow a similar growth curve. Syphilis, smallpox, typhoid....
@@robertmcgovern8850 this is so, but remember. Yersinia has an animal species that it is endemic to (several in fact) and as such most of the evolutionary pressure is for it to be most easily passed on and less virulent for THAT species, not humans.
I only discovered you a couple of months ago. Great stuff! Keep it up.
This is a really educational and intriguing video. I love your voice too, very calm and keeps my attention.
Thank you for Sharing.You also have a nice voice and delivery.
Im intetested in learning about this sort of History,so its great to listen to you.
Thank you.
Interesting and thanks for not interjecting current thinking into history as many do. History is best described from the writings or knowledge from the actual time when it was happening by those who lived in it. The rest is a half educated guess. Well done !!
Lovely Dan just sitting down to my tea and enjoy one of my favourite channels. Thanks for the work. 🇮🇪
Nice one, cheers Sean.
Your "cause & effect" insight is brilliant
Thank you.
In my studies of Norwegian genealogies of my mother, there is a province/county near Telemark, where it is named Treungen. In the aftermath of the Black Death, when 8 million people were reduced down to 125,000, ... Norway only regained its repopulation back up to 8 million at the time of Norwegian people migrating to the Americas in the late 1870s, ... in this fylke, the searchers only found 3 young ones, thus the name. An entire fylke of people were wiped out.
Great video :) thank you.
My personal take away of the decline is as you stated, multiple causes. The drop in the male population to me is a sign of warfare and often after warring in distant countries, diseases often spreads.
Some deseases are gender specific or more dangerous to one gender than the other, and other times it's an ailment caused during hunting (such as poisoned water drank on the go), so it doesn't always have to be warfare.
@@YamiKisara true males typically die faster for many reasons but historically rapid drops in male is typically due to warfare
aight good sir, just got yourself a new reader. something in the bronzeage-setting is exactly what i needed.
Interesting video, thanks for posting.
If plague really did wipe out the Neolithic population (which as you state could be one factor among many, and an unlikely one) then the situation in Neolithic Europe would've been similar to the one in Mesoamerica in the 16th century. It seems that diseases brought by the Spanish had travelled ahead of them, so that when the Conquistadors arrived in certain areas the population had already been decimated or completely wiped out by disease.
Well hello history! I've been looking for you. I am so glad you are doing this! Thank yoy
Sweet, fascinating videos. Your story telling is captivating and so, I'm binge watching .
Thank you
Thank you very much.
Awesome video. I think it was the same in the 6th century UK - the plague of Justinian killed off so many of the locals that the incomers were essentially moving into almost deserted lands. Thats why we have very little evidence of conflict. Might also explain why they eventuaaly only met resistance in the less populated western lands - hence the Arthur legends etc
Thank you for saying that our interpretations of cause and effect often say as much about us and the times we live in as it does about past peoples. I've noticed that, even when trying to explain modern occurrences, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, et cetera will allow their own prejudices and obsessions to color their interpretations of what happened. The truth is, most events are caused by a combination of many forces, not just one.
Did you realise that the last known cases of bubonic plague in England occurred at a little hamlet near Ipswich, Suffolk in 1918! Yes, just over 100 years ago. I believe 1 person died, but several others were very ill. This place is within walking distance of where my sister lives. Love your wonderful historic videos.
Y. Pestis, an old "companion" of humanity.
I always marvel how sone scholars want to promote THE (1 & only) CAUSE of such&such event. In reality, many airline crashes are often the end result of a chain of causalities each of which in of itself lead to the crash but together do. Likewise, the Bronze Age or neolithic collapse likewise are the result of cumulative effects of events each if which alone would not have lead to collapse. Over population + drought (or other climatic variation) + Y Pestis were too much.
Every major plague cycle coincided with the beginning of a COLD cycle in the climate.
@@emsnewssupkis6453 Not 100% but it's a good approximation yes. A reasonable correlation between those is that this drop in temperature (generally a sudden one like after a terrific volcanic eruption) leads to widespread crop failures that lead to famines and from there on the immune system is weakened and the small pests that normally survive off of humans are bundled together more closely and come closer to humans to search for food and well ...... you have a recipe for disaster. Not all pandemics start like that, but for the deadliest ones it seems to be a pretty recurring pattern (best example of that is the Justinian plague)
@@sephikong8323 Volcanic eruptions cause short cold cycles but the 300 year long weather cycles are quite real and cold 300 year cycles are notorious for causing massive disease events, this culls the human population which grew greatly during the preceding warm cycles.
@@emsnewssupkis6453 I know this, I am mostly talking about the sudden and extremely deadly but relatively short lived pandemics like we saw in the fifth and fourteenth century, those come extremely suddenly and disappear in a few years (though the Plague had some ripples throughout the Little Ice Age yes, bit it was nothing like the original one, these outbreaks were all limited in size and can't really be compared to the explosive outbreaks like the aforementioned ones which only seem to happen during very particular and sudden circumstances like a very big Volcqnic eruption that lowers the global temperatures for a few years)
@@emsnewssupkis6453 I wonder how the combination of cold, the resultant poor harvests and malnutrition wouldn't have set the stage for plague. In addition I wonder if the dead bodies left by warfare would also been an influence, i.e after the Mongol invasion in the 12th-13th centuries?
It does seem as though the herding cultures spend thousands of years in close proximity to their animals without getting sick, building a natural immunity?
I find it fascinating that this is your side gig, Dan. Top quality.
Thank you, excellent as always, and sorry for giving you shit in your poll earlier.
I would very much lean toward a very slight increase in the average low temperature in the region as a way to increase human movement and productivity, as well as increased survival of Y pestis. A slight shift of a single variable is like the proverbial lost horsehoe nail that felled a kingdom, wide ranging consequences can cascade from small changes applied in the right time and place.
Really great vid, good job 👍
Going to watch the rest of ur vids now
Thank you.
Fascinating stuff. You really excel at what you do. Thank you.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Wonderful video! Will definitely check out your books!
Thanks for the excellent content.
Thanks for watching and commenting Ben.
I like how you acknowledge complexity and the breadth of interpretation that allows.
Thank you for saying "bacterium" when it's singular, and not "bacteria", which is plural. I want you to know it didn't go unnoticed and is much appreciated : )
Thank you for bringing this up, as i didn't know this before. So cheers =)
Just found your channel tonight and am instantly hooked.
Wonderful. Welcome to the channel.
Is it plausible that the Trypillian towns provided the right conditions for the plague to jump from livestock to humans? As I understand it, urban conditions make this far more probable given the level of human-animal contact in such scenarios, and most deadly epidemics come from animals originally IIRC.
Yeah you're right and they were dependent on cattle and also farmed pigs. It's been a few days since I read the studies but I think the ancestor of Y.pestis is found in more ancient samples on the steppe suggesting that's where it evolved into the plague. I'll have to double check but they do show their reasoning in the study.
You're right tho, it's urban conditions that cause the rapid evolution into disease.
Don't suppose ticks and other disease vectors from that time period were any different to the many varieties we now know today. If it can do so now, possibly it was the same then. Especially since more animals were warm blooded at that point.
@@DanDavisHistory If that’s the case, and I could be grasping at straws here, could it explain why the steppe herding Scythians held a taboo against pigs?
Did they have a taboo against pigs? Well pig rearing is only possible for settled peoples. I know you get swineherds but you can't herd pigs across the steppes.
@@DanDavisHistory according to Herodotus they did, and some Scythian tribes did settle down.
The Native Americans used to burn their houses - and all their clothing - when hantavirus plagues showed up among them. There was a saying among, I think, the Navajo - it might have been the Hopi, but iirc Navajo - that if a mouse crawled across your clothes, you must immediately burn those clothes. So that makes sense to me, the burning of the houses during the neolithic.
“Liquefying” people is a good and horrifying way to describe it 😱
Based on what I've read about it before in school (which was like a million years ago) that's a pretty accurate description 🤢
@@eacalvert Being morbid, I've watched a lot of plague documentaries and I agree! 😱
Radiation poisoning does pretty much the same thing, but it sounds cooler and usually lasts longer.
@@mikitz I guess when all your cells are dying your turning into goo 😫
An intriguing idea and subject. Well done man.
Fabulous video, you really take your content & storytelling to the next level, really excellent 🌟🌟🌟!!’
Thank you so much Olina.
Thanks
Alot of ancient settlements look like they were abandoned because of disease.
How have I not found this channel earlier? Great stuff,
Just wanted to mention, some pneumonic plague strains can actually kill you in as little as 24 hours in the right conditions (such as being stressed, elderly, or a child.) Usually it takes closer to three days though, as the video said.
I found you through John and wow. Your storytelling is wonderful. 🙏🏼
You do good work. And, at a higher level than 'academic' historians. Good post.
Thank you very much. I have to say, I'm just reiterating the hard work of actual academics.
@@DanDavisHistory understand... still, your work is excellent. I am in the biz myself (writing and DNA work), and I tip my hat to you.
And I appreciate it enormously.
Well this channel was hiding from me. I'll be marathoning it. Hope your videos keep coming
Nice one matey
Cheers bro!
Just found your channel by accident, quite happy that i did.. hope you get more subs and views.. this is the kind of content that deserves millions in views and subscriptions.. sadly that is not the case but every sub and view helps in my opinion..
I have to admit that I rather learn about history than "living" in historic times 😉 wonderfully done, subscribed without hesitation
Very informative. Glad I decided to check the video.
The most mysterious periods of time, that I've only recently heard of, and you write novels based in them with your knowledge of the workings of these cultures. Sounds at least as interesting as Fatherland, and I will give it a look. Great Video, and thank you.
I am now finding out that you are a novelist. How fascinating! I will be checking out your work as soon as I can. I thoroughly enjoy your videos in particular, the one about the rite of passage of The Indo Europeans.
You would think that we might have considered massive cities as a bit of a liability then, but we just keep building them.
In Canada I’m watching my favourite province burn and thinking humans should have stayed hunter gatherers 😫
Because of overpopulation... Where would you stack this massive piles of amphibian shit?
@@paul6925 Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto is underrated
@@gregbors8364 Personally I've never read it but he wouldn't be the first nutjob to travel to the future to steal my brilliant thoughts!
@@gregbors8364 Uncle Ted was 100% right. I do not condone his methods, but I do sympathize.
This is excellent content Dan. I really hope your channel takes off because you deserve it. Keep up the good work and you'll be at 100k in no time!
Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Let's hope so!
Loved the video. Thanks for pointing out that reality is complex and causes tend to be multiple. Like maybe it was not even a single plague, maybe the steppe herders had also zoonotic illnesses gotten from horses that EEF had no defense against. May I interest you in the Iberian Neolithic-Chalcolithic? Los Millares, probably the first western european civilization, demands your love! Or the amazing Neolithic boats of Laja Alta. Or the burning question that Archeogenetics has gifted spanish scholars: In 2019 it was discovered that the iberians, speakers of a non indoeuropean language, had in fact steppe ancestry. Most of their male lineages had that origin. Their culture was also pretty horse-centric. So... How did that happen?.
Great video. It's this first I've watched from this channel.
I love the topic. I love that you research it so thoroughly. One of my favorite genres to read is historical fiction, but it has to be accurate. I will be buying your books! Thank you!
Feels like it may have been spread between these neighboring farmer cultures via grain trading. Wheat and barley are easy to transport, but hard to keep infected rats out of. The cucuteni-trypillians may have had horrible rat infestations which spread to their neighbors through exchanging other goods for grain shipments.
This channel is great - well balanced and informative. Thank you. Wishing you many more subscribers.
Glad I found your videos. I’ve always had a strong interest in history of all types, and these videos fill in some of the gaps from books I’ve read over the past 50 years. Thank you!
Wonderful, thank you.
What a fantastic channel and topics. So glad I found it. I've been binge watching. Going to get some of your books.
Thanks, welcome to the channel, glad you're enjoying the videos. I hope you like the books too.
Just found your channel and subbed. Great video thanks.
Burning does more for rodent and insect control than plague control
Brilliant, happy to have found your channel.
As a fellow UA-camr, I just wanted to say.. WELL DONE ON FITTING IN SO MANY CTAs 👏🏽 👏🏽 👏🏽
What a gem of a channel! I'll check out your books, Sir
No doubt, as you said, there were probably multiple reasons. Perhaps climate change led to food shortages, conflict, immune system stress, then Y. pestis decided it was party time.
Wow the quality of your videos is amazing! I’ll have to check out your book. I hope your channel grows in the future, keep it up
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
Well done !!!
Thank you.
Great vid. nice narration.very easy to listen too subscribed
Thanks and welcome.
Always surprised to find a Video Maker who has an IQ over 20 lately ... subbed > I would like to see more about = Rickettsia prowazekii, as the vaccine almost killed me at 5 - I had a temp of 105.6 ...F
Great channel.Love you narration.
I recall from medieval times they put bundles of brushwood on the floor and even slept on it. Not changing it out for years or even forever. Does not seem to be a healthy thing to me.
Much like sawdust on the floor of saloons and taverns, rushes were supposed to be periodically swept out. I suppose that some households were either too lazy to go to the trouble, or were too poor to afford it.
@@baraxor I read it was bundles of tied together brushwood, maybe 2 to 4 inches thick on a stomped clay-ground. Stayed there for years. Quite warm and dry to sit and sleep on and also relatively soft. Unfortunately I can not find something to quote for that. I hope my memory is not playing a prank on me.
In my area later there were bigger houses. On one head end were the sleeping rooms of the owners and children. then left and right the hands. With a wooden floor over some foot of empty space. Then a dividing wall, then kitchen, older versions with a firehole in the ground and a spark catcher over it. Then left and right at the side walls room for the cattle. Later versions had room for the hands on top of the cattle and also storage room for hay and harvest. the smoke from the kitchen was disinfecting the thatched roof over all of it, in later centuries they used separated kitchen with hearth and chimney. all the ground except the sleeping area was stomped clay.
there were different versions of course.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German_house
The house of an aunt of mine was a late version of that from about 1800. The living area already renovated two steps up with stone floor and roof tiles on top of everything. I remember i helped them hauling hay bricks from a wagon through a hole up to the hayloft above the horses to the left and right using a big fork. Wow, that was exhausting.
My grandfathers house from 1925 was a craftsmans house and lot. one basement room for storage. The rest had double brick walls in the sand with isolation gap and wooden planks half a meter above sand. The wooden floor was covered with linoleum.
Liked and subbed!!! Great content!!