Wild Free and Happy Sample 25.5

 [Note: This is a new section in my rough draft of a far from finished book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  It will be inserted before sample 26.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

STUMBLING INTO DOMESTICATION

In his lecture, Four Domestications, James Scott described four turning points that radically changed the course of the human saga — the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and ourselves.  We domesticated ourselves by radically changing the way we lived, in order to protect and nurture the survival and growth of crops and herds.  We controlled their lives, and they controlled ours.  Many tasks had to be performed at specific times for optimal results — tilling, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, etc.  Herders also fine-tuned their ongoing schedules and activities for the benefit of their livestock. 

We’ve already looked at the domestication of fire, and how this superpower radically altered the human saga.  It enabled tropical humans to survive in chilly non-tropical regions (snow country), colonize the planet, and eventually become participants in monstrous fire-breathing industrial civilizations.  This chapter will focus on plant and animal domestication, which mostly began within the last 13,000 years, and fired up the turbochargers for our high-speed one-way rocket ride into the unknown.

Supply and Demand

Mother Africa was the homeland where hominins first evolved maybe six million years ago.  Experts do not agree on when humans first emerged.  Estimates range from maybe 250,000 to 400,000 years ago.  For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were nomadic foragers — hunters and gatherers.  Around 60,000 years ago, some pioneers decided to see the world, and began exploring the tropics of southern Asia, on a path toward Australia. 

Around 42,000 years ago, humans were present up north in Europe, a region with a temperate climate.  It was a major shift, moving outside of the tropical climate for which evolution had fine-tuned us.  The curiosity of these explorers helped to accelerate our journey to a stormy future.  Long term survival in a non-tropical region required loads of radical innovations.

As mentioned earlier, William Rees proposed two fundament ecological concepts.  (1) Every species will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.  (2) When they expand into new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them. 

Humans regularly bumped into limits as they colonized the world, and cleverness often provided ways to bypass the obstacles.  As long as wild foods were abundant, there was no need to pursue farming or herding, which required far more time, difficulty, and risk.  Large game was our ancestors’ preferred food but, over time, hunting a bit too much could gradually deplete the delicious herds.  Efforts then had to shift to class B and class C foods — small game, forest animals, waterfowl, fish, shellfish, insects, and so on. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that as the last ice age weakened, the climate warmed, and the more comfortable Holocene era began.  The forests of Europe were able to migrate northward from the Mediterranean, displacing some tundra regions, and their megafauna residents.  These forests were home to more solitary game like aurochs, boars, elk, deer, and small animals.  The total biomass of these forest animals was only 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of the tundra herds they replaced.  Reduced access to easy meat motivated lifestyle changes.  Folks learned that it was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of foods might be gathered.  This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while. 

Diana Muir wrote an environmental history of New England, from the ice age to today.  On the tundra, folks hunted mastodons, horses, bison, and four species of mammoths.  There were sabertooth cats, giant bears, giant beavers, and musk oxen.  As the climate warmed, forests spread northward.  When the tundra megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens. 

Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.  Stuff like acorns and shellfish were reserved for famine food.  As game got scarce, shellfish became a mainstay.  An adult male would need 100 oysters or quahogs each day.  Thousands were dug and smoked for winter consumption, a tedious job.  In the lower layers of huge shell dumps were oyster shells 10 to 20 inches across (25 to 50 cm) — oysters 40 years old.  In higher levels, the shells got smaller and smaller. 

Eventually, the seeds of domesticated corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that pursued the new experiment could produce more food, and feed more people.  When fields were first cleared, and the virgin soil was still highly fertile, agricultural land might sometimes produce a hundred times more food than an equal area of wild land used by foragers.  Of course, population pressure is a predictable cause of social friction and bloody conflict.  Because they had no livestock, they had no manure to help conserve soil fertility, which declines over time, shrinking the harvests.

The big picture here is an endless struggle for survival, in which limits periodically stomped on the brakes, and cleverness often found new ways to temporarily sneak around them.  Cleverness is not an all-powerful miracle-making magic wand.  It also has limits, as the folks on Easter Island discovered, when the last tree fell (whoops!).  It’s not easy to cleverly sneak around food scarcity.  Options often boiled down to starvation, mindful family planning, or a blind leap into the mysterious realm of food production.

Cradle of Civilization

Jared Diamond seriously wondered why some cultures could remain rich and powerful for centuries, while many others rarely, if ever, had an opportunity to sniff prosperity’s butt.  He invested a massive number of brain cycles in a quest to find answers.  In 1987, he published his boat-rocking essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” [Link or Link]. 

He wrote, “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.  In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.  With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence.”

Ten years later, in 1997, Diamond published his classic, Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he presented a book length discussion of what he had learned.  Domestication emerged independently in maybe nine locations around the world, but one region in Eurasia played a starring role in influencing the chain of events that eventually led to the bruised, beaten, and bleeding world outside your window.

It began one day, thousands of years ago, when some intrepid pioneers happened to stumble into an amazing jackpot known as the Fertile Crescent, the Cradle of Civilization.  Gasp!  It was as if their wildest dreams had come true!  The place was home to a great abundance of wild game and plant foods — a heavenly paradise. 

Life was grand for a while, but as the mobs grew in number, they naturally smacked into more and more annoying limits.  Cleverness inspired behaviors and illusions that put folks on the treacherous path to farming and herding.  This generated a surge of temporary prosperity, while it permanently degraded the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as centuries passed, the forests, soils, and wildlife got rubbished.  Paradise deteriorated into depleted cropland, deserts, ancient ruins, and persistent bloody conflicts.  The Fertile Crescent (like every other region), was not an ecosystem that could tolerate endless agriculture.  Diamond noted that farming is a slow motion act of ecological suicide.

In 2002, five years after Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond published a paper, “Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication.” [Link]  It presented some additional thoughts.  The emergence of domestication, maybe 10,500 years ago, inspired tremendous changes.  It commenced in Eurasia, primarily in the Fertile Crescent and parts of China, where the whims of “biogeographic luck” provided perfect conditions for seriously dangerous mischief. 

Not only were wild foods abundant, but an unusual number of the plant and animal species possessed characteristics that made them suitable for domestication.  Despite centuries of trial and error, clever humans have discovered that it’s impossible to domesticate the vast majority of plants and animals.  To be suitable for domestication, species must have specific collection of vulnerabilities.

For example, Diamond listed six obstacles that made it impossible to domesticate most large animal species.  Any one of these could prevent enslavement: (1) a diet not easily supplied by humans, (2) slow growth rate and long birth spacing, (3) nasty disposition, (4) reluctance to breed in captivity, (5) lack of follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies, and (6) a tendency to panic in enclosures or when faced with predators.  

Diamond wrote that there are maybe 200,000 wild plant species in the world, of which about 100 have been domesticated.  The Fertile Crescent was home several wild grasses that produced large cereal seeds (barley, einkorn, emmer, and spelt), a rich source of carbohydrates.  There were also several varieties of pulses (peas, beans, and lentils) that provided protein.  In the whole world, purely by random chance, the Fertile Crescent was the biggest treasure chest of future super foods, both plant and animal.  It was essentially ground zero for the birth of civilization.

Globally, there are 148 species of large land-dwelling mammalian herbivores and omnivores that weigh more than 100 pounds (45 kg).  Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 51 of these species, but none of them have been domesticated, because they luckily failed to meet all of the six criteria for enslavement.

Of the 148 species, just 14 have been domesticated.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species eventually became multinational superstars.  The Fertile Crescent was home to four of the five: the goat, sheep, pig, and cow (horses are the fifth) — an amazing coincidence. 

Of the 14 domesticated species, 13 of them originated in Eurasia.  Consequently, it’s no coincidence that Eurasia played a primary role in the growth and spread of acute, highly infectious, epidemic crowd diseases.  Farming and herding created communities of humans that lived in unhealthy proximity to unnatural concentrations of livestock, poultry, rats, fleas, mosquitoes, etc. 

This encouraged a number of animal pathogens to adapt to human hosts, including influenza, smallpox, tuberculosis, plague, measles, and cholera.  Diamond noted, “Such diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture, because they can sustain themselves only in large dense populations that did not exist before agriculture, hence they are often termed crowd diseases.”

Nomadic foragers lived in small groups, enslaved no livestock or poultry, and periodically moved their camps — a brilliant strategy for avoiding diseases.  On the other hand, humans who lived in crowded villages and cities made tremendous advances in unsanitary living.  Crap and garbage was all over the place, all the time.  Rivers were the source of drinking water, and the dumping place for sewage and filth.  A later chapter will take a closer look at disease.

Diamond noted four developments that dimmed the future for hunter-gatherers, and encouraged the expansion of farming and herding.  (1) Over time, hunting gradually made large game less abundant.  (2) We learned new skills for collecting, processing, and storing foods.  (3) Societies competed, spurring innovations that improved our ability to survive.  (4) Growing populations required large-scale food production.

Folks who inhabited a paradise of plant and animal super foods, learned lots of tricks for maximizing food production.  Population surged, spurring the emergence of cities and civilizations.  Civilization encouraged the development of stuff like metallurgy, industry, deforestation, soil destruction, warfare, overcrowding, patriarchy, and slavery.

So, let’s rephrase what William Rees said about species.  (1) “Every civilization will expand to all locations that are accessible to them, where conditions might allow their survival.”  As they expand, they will take along their livestock, crop seeds, weaponry, culture, technology, religions, and diseases.  (2) “When they colonize new habitat, they will utilize all available resources, until limits restrain them.”

Eurasia spans from Europe to China.  The earliest centers of domestication were the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.  State of the art food production provided both centers with powerful advantages over their more humble neighbors.  The two centers became hubs for territorial expansion, and their languages, genes, tools, and cultural influences have spread around the world. 

This is a spooky story.  From the two hubs, the realm of farming and herding spread in many directions.  In the sixteenth century, European travelers began noticing striking similarities in Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages.  They appeared to have a common ancestor.  As the years flowed by, scholars noticed that lots of other languages also had similarities.  A category was created to name this large assortment.

Visit Wikipedia’s discussion of Indo-European Languages.  See the maps that show how this language family spread across the Old World over time.  Around 500 years ago, the age of global colonization exported them to the Americas, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.  Today, the native language of about 46 percent of humankind, is an Indo-European tongue.

Drop a pebble in a calm pool of water, and rings of ripples spread in every direction.  Diamond wrote that humankind’s long and stormy story of food production, population growth, civilization, and global domination, began in the Fertile Crescent.  The pebble is called domestication.

Diamond lamented, “If they had actually foreseen the consequences, they would surely have outlawed the first steps towards domestication, because the archaeological and ethnographic record throughout the world shows that the transition from hunting and gathering to farming eventually resulted in more work, lower adult stature, worse nutritional condition, and heavier disease burdens.”

Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can readily see the many unnecessary wrong turns that our ancestors made.  At the same time, we can observe the world around us today, and readily see the catastrophes that those wrong turns triggered.  It’s heartbreaking.  Cleverness without foresight is a deadly duo.  It sure is an interesting time to be alive!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 57

 

[Note: This is the fifty-seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

[Continued from Climate Crisis 02 Sample 56]

Water and Climate

In The Great Acceleration, McNeill and Engelke described how a warming climate is disturbing the relationship between water and the family of life.  The precipitation patterns of the past are changing, creating new challenges for ecosystems, human societies, and life as we know it.

Extreme weather events are expected to occur more frequently.  When ocean surface temperatures get warmer, cyclones are more likely to be spawned.  Warmer air can hold more moisture.  In regions having a moist climate, clouds bloated with water are more likely to form.  More and more often, storms are dumping huge loads of rain, sudden deluges that cause destructive floods and landslides.  In regions having a dryer climate, warmer air will create fewer clouds, produce less rain, crank up the air temperature, intensify drought conditions, and encourage wildfires. 

With a warming climate, the glaciers of the world are melting and retreating more rapidly.  Winter precipitation is delivering more rain, less snow.  Winter rain tends to run off promptly.  Snowpack retains the moisture longer.  It melts later, closer to the growing season, when the water can be used to irrigate thirsty cropland. 

The water flowing out of the Himalayas feeds the Indus, Yangzi, Mekong, Ganges, Yellow, Brahmaputra, and Irrawaddy rivers.  Two billion people depend on this water arriving in adequate amounts, at the appropriate time.  In the coming years, more water shortages and major changes are expected.

Paul Ehrlich and John Harte wrote that a third of global crop production depends on irrigation.  Melting snow has been an essential source of irrigation water.  “The winter snowpack in mountainous regions such as the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Sierra, and the Andes is a most efficient reservoir, storing water through the cold months and releasing it gradually as snowmelt in warm months when farmers need it.”

“In response to severe and prolonged drought in many regions of the world, including China, India, Thailand, Italy, and California, loss of surface irrigation water has resulted in excessive pumping of groundwater, which in turn has led to land subsidence, groundwater depletion, and irreversible loss of aquifer volume.”  Food production is also challenged by droughts, deluges, super storms, heat waves, aggressive wildfires, declining insect pollinators, soil salinization, soil depletion, erosion, and so on.

Sahana Ghosh reported that the once mighty Ganges River is wheezing.  Over the years, river volume has been declining, because farmers have been diverting too much water via their irrigation canals.  The river got shallower.  Then, they switched to tube wells with motorized pumps.  Naturally, overpumping the groundwater has serious consequences.  In the dry months, the river now looks more like a mudflat.  Reduced flow also concentrates the load of pollutants.  Researcher Abhijit Mukherjee said, “Our prediction shows that about 115 million people can be impacted due to insufficient food availability in the next few decades.”

Jim Robbins wrote about the Colorado River blues.  The 1,450 mile (2,333 km) watershed starts in the Rocky Mountains and ends at the Pacific.  It used to empty into the Gulf of California, but not a single drop of water enters the Gulf today.  In 2018, river volume was just two-thirds of normal, tied for the record low.

The Colorado is one of the most heavily engineered waterways in the world — designed for the benefit of humans, not nature.  It is the source of much contention.  It serves 40 million people, and the number of users keeps growing.  A drought since 2000 has reduced its flow.  It is the most severe drought in 1,250 years.  The Lake Mead reservoir at Hoover Dam, and the Lake Powell reservoir at Glen Canyon Dam, are at all-time lows.

Some suspect that climate change is drying out the West.  This is not just a temporary drought, the West may actually be getting permanently dryer.  “Worst case, if the reservoirs ever hit ‘dead pool’ — when levels drop too low for water to be piped out — many people in the region could become climate refugees.”

Agriculture uses 80 percent of the Colorado’s water, cities use 10 percent.  As demand exceeds supply, some users will be cut off.  Dewatering agriculture would snuff out many farms and nearby towns.  Wildlife does not have a top priority. 

Frederick Pleitgen and team described an emerging water shortage crisis in the Middle East, caused by persistent drought and extreme heat.  Temperatures sometimes soar to life threatening levels.  Rainfall mostly evaporates.  Rivers, lakes, and wetlands are drying up.  As Iran’s once large and beautiful Lake Urmia shrinks, its water is getting too salty, so farmers are pumping groundwater for irrigation.  Aquifers are being overpumped, depleting the limited reserves.  If current trends continue, some regions will become uninhabitable.

Homes in Jordan receive some water once or twice a week.  Numerous upstream dams limit the amount of water that eventually arrives at the end of the watershed.  Israel has a huge water desalinization program that requires large amounts of fossil energy to operate, adding still more carbon into the atmosphere.

Agriculture and Climate

Every variety of plant and animal has different environmental requirements for optimal health.  They all have evolved to survive within a limited range of conditions.  Humans can’t survive extreme conditions, nor can the livestock and crops we depend on.  When reality is shifting into a new and unusual trend, the family of life will struggle, and some will blink out.  Evolution is not a speedy process. 

With regard to crop plants, important variables include temperature, sunlight hours, pH, available moisture, soil fertility, and so on.  As warming proceeds, the regions that have a tropical climate are expanding from their equatorial homeland toward the poles.  Regions that used to be temperate are getting hotter.  In the good old days, frigid winters used to provide beneficial pest control, by freezing lots of insects and other things that harmed crops and humans.  Winter precipitation was stored in ice and snow.

Brian Halweil emphasized how important a stable climate is to agriculture.  In 2003, for the first time, the potato blight fungus came to visit the town of Chacllabamba, Peru.  It almost totally destroyed their crop.  Located at an altitude of 13,000 feet (4,000 m), a cool climate had protected the potato fields for thousands of years.  No more.  Spuds had been their staple food.

Jerry Hatfield and John Prueger investigated how rising temperatures affected a variety of crop plants.  Extreme heat events may last a few days, and have a big impact.  When temperatures are outside of the ideal range, plant growth, pollination, and reproductive processes can be affected.  Pollination is especially sensitive to rising temperatures.  High temperatures during the reproductive phase of the life cycle can reduce corn yields by as much as 80 to 90 percent. 

When wheat is maturing, a frost can cause the grains to be sterile.  Too much heat can reduce the number of grains that form.  Rice is especially vulnerable to high heat during the pollination process.  For the major crops, yields are expected to decrease as global temperatures rise. 

Kimberly Cartier noted that growing conditions are getting less predictable than in the past.  Rainy seasons may be more intense than usual, or less.  Their arrival may be earlier than the ideal time, or later.  The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) pattern is associated with precipitation patterns, and it is a well-known troublemaker.  In 1983, an unusual ENSO coincided with the largest global failure of corn (maize) crops in modern records.  ENSO can also alter wheat and soybean production on a global scale.

Mike Davis wrote about a horrific era of ENSO related droughts and famines.  In the years 1876-79 and 1896-1902 between 12.2 and 29.3 million died of famine in India.  In the Madras Deccan, “the only well-fed part of the local population were the pariah dogs, ‘fat as sheep,’ that feasted on the bodies of dead children.”  In the same period, between 19.5 and 30 million died of famine in China, and 2 million in Brazil.  Famine hit these three nations the hardest, but many other nations were also affected.  In the U.S., churches organized to send relief to hungry farmers in the Dakotas and western Kansas.

Samuel Markings wrote about the relationship between photosynthesis and temperature.  In plants, photosynthesis is the process that uses sunlight to transform water and CO₂ into food (glucose) and oxygen.  Optimum temperatures range between 50 to 68°F (10 to 20°C).  Above this range, higher temperatures slow photosynthesis.  The process declines sharply when temps rise above 104°F (40°C).  When temps persist in this range, plant survival is endangered.

Abdul Wahid and team wrote an extensive report on heat tolerance in plants.  Each crop species has a threshold temperature.  If this temperature is exceeded too long, the result is heat stress — irreversible damage to plant growth and development.  Harm varies based on intensity (temperature in degrees), duration, and the rate at which the temperate rose.

Qunying Luo extensively described threshold temperatures for a number of major crop species.  At different stages of a plant’s life, they can be damaged by excess heat — leaf initiation, shoot growth, root growth, sowing to emergence, grain filling, etc.  For example, “Several studies found that temperatures of above 35°C (95°F) are lethal to maize pollen viability”

Tnau Agritech Portal published a report on the effects of high temperature on plant growth in India.  Each plant species has a thermal death point.  For many annual crops, 122°F (50°C) is fatal.  Excess heat can reduce yields, and inhibit the absorption and assimilation of nutrients.  It can cause pollen abortion, which reduces the grain set.  Even short exposure can affect the growth of shoots and roots. 

Evelyn Lamb wrote that rice provides 16 to 20 percent of the calories consumed by humankind.  Corn and wheat are similarly popular.  Thus, more than half of the calories consumed by humans are provided by rice, corn, and wheat.  Growing rice in flooded paddies produces more greenhouse gas emissions per calorie than corn or wheat, twice the emissions from wheat.

Santosh Koirala reported that most rice crops begin by transplanting young plants in flooded paddies (“puddling”).  “When rice is grown under puddled transplanted conditions, paddy soil becomes anoxic — depleted of dissolved oxygen — and then, in the absence of oxygen, microbes that break down plant matter produce methane.”  Puddling “is becoming less profitable because of the costs of labour, shortage of water, and high energy costs.”  It results in depletion of soil quality, and higher methane emissions.

 “Methane is the second major greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide, and agriculture accounts for 40% of these greenhouse emissions.  Although farm animals are a major source, flooded rice paddies emit as much as 500 million tons, which is around 20% of total manmade emissions of this gas.”

Kritee Kritee and team noted that rice is a staple food for almost half of humankind, so it’s especially important to pay attention to its climate impacts.  Globally, one third of water used for irrigation goes to rice farming.  Rice receives one seventh of all fertilizer used.  “Methane from global rice cultivation currently accounts for one-half of all crop-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

Experts recommended that these methane emissions could be reduced by shifting from continuously flooded rice fields to intermittent flooding.  Unfortunately, the team was surprised to discover that this brilliant solution had an unintended consequence.  The emissions of nitrous oxide (N₂O) tripled — a greenhouse gas that persists in the atmosphere much longer than methane.  It is an unintended consequence of using nitrogen rich fertilizer.

Janet Ranganathan and team wrote a hefty and thorough report filled with recommendations for reducing the environmental harm caused by high impact diets and overpopulation.  Consumption of animal-based foods is growing, and these foods (especially beef), result in higher emissions of greenhouse gases. 

Meat and dairy foods are not necessary for adequate nutrition, so less is better.  “Plant-based foods can be readily combined to provide the full set of essential amino acids, as with rice and beans or peanut butter and bread.”  The only essential not provided by a vegetarian diet is vitamin B12, which supplements can provide. 

Obesity is a growing trend, even among low-income people.  “Globally, there are now two-and-a-half times more overweight than undernourished people.  More than one in three adults are overweight.”  Folks around the world are overdoing the consumption of calories and protein. 

The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report is a spellbinding 878 page report on the carbon cycle in North America.  I learned a very important fact of life:  “Globally, soils contain more than three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, and four and a half times more carbon than the world’s biota [living things]; therefore, even small changes in soil carbon stocks could lead to large changes in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂).”

Carbon compounds are central to the existence of the entire family of life.  The CO₂ that plants extract from the atmosphere allows them to live and grow.  Plants exhale oxygen that animals need, and animals exhale CO₂ that plants need.  Soil is home to an amazing community of fantastic microbes.  Dead organic material contains carbon.  When it drops to the ground, soil microbes eagerly decompose it, and do so in a way that stabilizes the carbon, so it is more likely to be retained in the soil, rather than float away.  Soil microbes that encourage carbon retention do not enjoy unusual shifts in moisture or temperature.  They don’t enjoy deforestation, tilling, or being sprayed with farm chemicals. 

Livestock production is a significant source of greenhouse gases — CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide.  Ruminants include cattle, sheep, goats, elk, deer, bison, etc.  The digestive system in ruminants includes a process called enteric fermentation, which produces methane emissions (3% farts, 97% belches).  Poultry, hogs, and horses emit greenhouse gases in smaller volumes via different processes.  Manure stored in large quantities generates large emissions of methane.  Pools of deep shit contain little or no oxygen, so they provide ideal conditions for producing methane.

“Soils in North America have lost, on average, 20% to 75% of their original topsoil carbon with historical conversion to agriculture.”  Most of this conversion took place in the last 200 years or so.  To add insult to injury, “On a per-person basis, food loss and waste in North America is 375 to 500 kilograms per year.” (826 to 1,102 pounds)

Arctic Fires

Zombie fires were the subject of a BBC story.  They are also called overwintering fires or peat fires.  They occur in Russia, Canada, and Alaska.  In recent years, temperatures in the Arctic have been soaring, and permafrost has been thawing.  When tundra and forest lands dry out, they become prone to wildfires.  These fires can ignite ancient peat deposits beneath the surface.  Toasty peat can smolder all winter, beneath the snow cover.  When spring arrives, the snow melts, oxygen reaches the embers, and the fire can reignite.  They “come back from the dead,” hence the zombie tag. 

Alexandra Witze reported that in the summer of 2020, there were many Siberian tundra fires, and they emitted 244 megatons of CO₂, a 35 percent increase over the intense 2019 fire season.  About half of the fires were burning on peat lands, the most carbon-dense ecosystems.  When shallow layers near the surface dry out, they are more susceptible to burning.  Warmer winters and springs mean the fire season starts sooner.  In the Arctic, the fire zone is moving northward, into lands that have traditionally been fire-resistant. 

Portia Kentish reported that the climate crisis is well underway in Arctic regions, causing huge and spooky impacts — a powerful warning to the rest of the world, which is not leaping to action.  During a May 2020 heat wave, locations in Siberia that are normally close to freezing had temperatures hotter than Athens or Rome.  Some Arctic permafrost is up to 80,000 years old.  When permafrost thaws, methane emissions begin.  Heat waves encourage wildfires.  They are burning peat deposits that have been building up for 15,000 years.  About half of Russia’s Arctic fires are consuming peat soil. 

Forest Impacts

We could sequester lots of CO₂ by planting enormous numbers of trees.  That sounds wholesome.  Sadly, the current fad is deforestation — cutting enormous numbers of trees to grow soybeans, create livestock pastures, make charcoal, produce wood products, and clear the way for urban sprawl.

As the planet gets warmer, forests will become more vulnerable to pests and pathogens.  Droughts will become hotter, longer, and dryer.  This encourages wildfires.  Wikipedia is posting pages that, year by year, document wildfire activity in the world.  The report for the record breaking year of 2021 is [HERE].  As of August 19, fires had been reported in Algeria, South Africa, Cyprus, India, Israel, Russia, Turkey, France, Greece, Italy (10 regions), Canada, and United States (9 states), Argentina, and Australia.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega reported that climate change is encouraging trees to grow fast and die young.  Research suggests that this may be universal, affecting almost all tree species and climates.  Based on tree ring analysis, this trend corresponds with the exponential growth of human caused CO₂ emissions, as well as rising temperatures — a combo that stimulates rapid growth.  This reduces their potential for maximum long term CO₂ absorption. 

Nate McDowell and team studied changing forests.  “Shifts in forest dynamics are already occurring, and the emerging pattern is that global forests are tending toward younger stands with faster turnover as old-growth forest with stable dynamics are dwindling.”  These shifts are occurring because of “anthropogenic-driven exacerbation of chronic drivers, such as rising temperature and CO₂, and increasing transient disturbances, including wildfire, drought, windthrow, biotic attack, and land-use change.”  Their findings indicate that it is “highly likely that tree mortality rates will continue to increase.” 

Robert Hunziker reported on new information linking rising temperatures with the increase in tree deaths.  In the U.S., giant sequoias are dying from the top down.  In the Southwest, drought has killed hundreds of millions of trees.  In Africa, 2,000 year old baobab trees are wheezing and dying.  In Germany, dead trees are everywhere.  Dead and dying trees are more vulnerable to insects and disease.  They provide abundant fuel for forest fires.  Siberia is burning up.  “New studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.” 

Dahr Jamail visited Glacier National Park, home to a formerly thriving boreal forest.  A warming climate has delighted millions of hungry pine bark beetles, some of whom can now have two life cycles per year.  In the last 20 years, beetles have killed 40 million acres (16 million ha) of trees.  They kill fewer pines now, because fewer pines remain alive.  The latest serial killer is white pine blister rust, which has infected almost 85 percent of the trees in the park.

Songlin Fei and team studied how insects and diseases are hammering U.S. forests, which are now home to more than 450 nonnative tree-feeding insects and tree pathogens.  The study focused on the 15 most destructive nonnative forest pests.  It found that “41.1% of the total live forest biomass in the conterminous United States is at risk of future loss from these 15 pests.  These results indicate that forest pest invasions, driven primarily by globalization, represent a huge risk to U.S. forests and have significant impacts on carbon dynamics.” 

Peter Wohlleben shared his intimate knowledge of the trees in his beloved German forest.  Trees can’t walk, but forests are always slowly wandering.  Since the end of the last ice age, a warming climate has enabled the trees of central Europe to gradually migrate northward.  Animals and winds move seeds away from their source.  Today, the climate is warming way too fast, which presents a mortal threat to temperature sensitive species.  Human tree huggers are working to relocate and transplant as many types of trees as possible.  Assisted migration is a heroic effort to “help forests walk.”

Climate and Disease

The climate crisis is not expected to promote miraculous advances in the health of humankind.  The huge herd is moving into an era of food insecurity, power shortages, water scarcity, poor sanitation, infectious diseases, deteriorating medical care systems, and so on.  A hotter climate and extreme weather events will add to these challenges.

The Lancet’s 2020 report presented a competent 42 page discussion on the climate change impacts on health.  Warming trends are increasing the frequency and intensity of floods, drought, storms, wildfire, temperature anomalies, and food scarcity.  These changes are killing more folks in the 65+ age range.  In 2018, heat waves killed about 296,000 people.

“The climate suitability for infectious disease transmission has been growing rapidly since the 1950s.”  The dengue virus is spreading across South America.  “From 1950 to 2018, the global climate suitability for the transmission of dengue increased by 8.9% for Aedes aegypti and 15% for Aedes albopictus.  In 2015 to 2019, suitability for malaria transmission in highland areas was 38.7% higher in the African region and 149.7% higher in the Western Pacific region compared with a 1950s baseline.”

David Wallace-Wells added that malaria also thrives in hotter regions because “for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite reproduces ten times faster.”  Consequently, by 2050, up to 5.2 billion people may be infected, according to World Bank estimates.  As tropical climates move northward, so will tropical pathogens.

Tipping Points

A tipping point in an ecosystem is a threshold that, when exceeded, can lead to large changes.  Sometimes an imbalance can reach a level of intensity that triggers an irreversible cascade of events, like a chain reaction of falling dominoes.  The climate crisis is a momentous tipping point in the human saga.  Melting Arctic ice has busted loose an avalanche of devastating changes.  Clever humans, with all their gee-whiz technology, are powerless to refreeze the Arctic, halt the avalanche, put the carbon back where it came from, and make everything nice again.

Over the millennia, high impact cultures have increasingly evolved into aggressive control freaks, radically manipulating ecosystems to satisfy their impulsive whims.  They are unencumbered by foresight, and display little respect for the family of life and the generations yet to come. 

For a very long time, their enthusiastic cleverness usually didn’t slam head-on into devastating limits.  They kept nature on a short leash, and brutally abused her.  The game is different now.  We’ve created changes that threaten our survival, changes we can’t undo.  We are no longer in the driver’s seat. 

Nature has put a tight leash around our necks, and we’re about to discover what it’s like to be powerless, kicked, and beaten.  Mistakes indeed have consequences (ouch!).  Our seat in the family of life is not a throne.  We are not the Crown of Creation.  We’re often more like hyperactive children who get completely lost, confused, and anxious.

Many folks who deliberately pay acute attention to reality are totally spooked.  These hyper alert folks have developed a special ability to comprehend the obvious — we’re in the <bleeping> express lane to surprising changes.  Many of them seem to perceive tipping points to be elements of a remarkable cosmic drama.  Tipping points are fire-breathing dragons that we must heroically slay in order avert runaway warming, and a hellish ecological apocalypse called Hothouse Earth.  

The alert ones are jumping up and down and shouting about tipping points, in a desperate frantic effort to wake up the clueless billions.  Dudes!  It’s time for action!  We only have ten years to fix this mess!  It’s not too late!  The presumption is that the mess is a solvable problem.  We are heavily indoctrinated with the illusion that technology can overcome any challenge. 

At the same time, the titans of industry assure us that they are ready and eager to sell us the miracles we need: electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines — clean green energy, and a prosperous economy that will grow until the end of time!  We can simply shop our way to a better tomorrow.  Everything will be OK.  Think happy thoughts.  Hope will save the world.

Will electric cars will be so cool that the Arctic ice refreezes?  Will the glaciers rise and shine again?  Will green energy be so cool that the permafrost stops thawing, and the methane seeps go back to sleep?  Is learning how to walk as hard as they say?  To learn more about tipping points, check out Fred Pearce, Timothy Lenton, Katharyn Duffy, and Will Steffen. 

[Continued in Climate Crisis 04, Sample 58]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 39

[Note: This is the thirty-ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.]

MEET OUR DISEASES

On the following pages, I’ll be jabbering a bit about different categories of diseases, and take a quick peek at some common examples.  Please remember that the primary purpose of this book is to compare and contrast wild humans with the less-than-wild mobs that emerged later — from the perspective that wild was our normal and natural state, and life as we now know it is the opposite.  There is an enormous difference between the two groups with regard to human health, and with regard to the health of the family of life.

Big Mama Nature lovingly fine-tuned our evolution.  Our ecological job description was to live as nomadic hunters, scavengers, and foragers who traveled in small groups.  Our natural habitat was open grasslands and forest edges.  In this manner, our hominin ancestors lived for several million years without radically disturbing fundamental balances in the family of life.  This, of course, is the norm for every member of the family.

Along the way, some clever ancestors got lost and confused.  By settling down, and crowding together in villages, towns, and cities, they developed a way of life that was at odds with our job description.  Over time, the quirky experiment grew and grew, and became ferociously unsustainable.  We sort of became herd animals, but not in a healthy wild way.

Herds of wild buffalo and horses have the inherent intelligence to follow their stomachs and keep moving.  They roam over the hill to where the grass is greener, and leave their shit behind to nurture the grass for future visits.  Herds of city dwellers generate enormous filth, at the same time they cause irreparable damage to the ecosystem.  This great “advance” in lifestyle triggers a whopping number of unintended consequences.  Let’s take a stroll down Pathogen Lane.

MALNUTRITION DISEASES

Richard Manning discussed what paleontologists have learned from old bones.  The bones of hunter-gatherers are boring to study, because most of them were very healthy.  Living in roadless wilderness, amidst man-eating predators, and using wooden spears to kill large strong animals, led to a lot of broken bones and premature deaths.  Folks did not spend their lives in climate-controlled compartments, or drive across the land in large motorized wheelchairs.  They inhaled a lot of smoke from their fires, which likely led to respiratory problems.  In warm regions, they were more vulnerable to intestinal parasites.

The bones of folks from agricultural societies were more interesting.  Their diet was far less nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers.  Until the last century, agricultural peasants spent their lives performing backbreaking labor, living in filthy conditions, and eating a low quality diet.  Many lived on bread and water alone, or oat porridge.  Meat was a rare treat.  This diet often led to illnesses from mineral and vitamin deficiencies, like pellagra, anemia, and thyroid problems.

Grain eaters commonly suffered from tooth decay, bone deformities, malnutrition, osteomyelitis, periostitis, intestinal parasites, malaria, yaws, syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, anemia, rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults, slow childhood growth, and short stature among adults.  Let’s take a look at a few diseases of malnutrition.

Rickets

Rickets is a disease of severely malnourished infants and children.  Their bones are soft, are easily fractured, and can grow abnormally. Rickets is common in a number of developing nations.  We get vitamin D when we consume foods like butter, eggs, oily fishes, fish liver oils, and fortified milk.  Our skin cells use sunlight to convert vitamin D into a usable form, which enables our bodies to properly absorb calcium.  When this doesn’t happen, dental and skeletal deformities can develop — knock-knees, bowlegs, bulging foreheads, or narrow pelvises that interfere with normal childbirth.  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in London, heavy smog, combined with persistent fog blocked a lot of sunlight.  At times, up to 80 percent of children had symptoms of rickets.

Pellagra

Pellagra is caused by chronic niacin deficiency (vitamin B3).  Its victims suffer from diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia.  If not treated, death often occurred in 4 to 5 years.  Pellagra was common prior to the 1920s, at which point folks discovered that it could be easily cured by a diet that included daily servings of milk, eggs, or meat. 

In northern Italy, the poor lived primarily on boiled cornmeal, polenta.  In the U.S. south, pellagra was common among poor folks whose diet majored in cornmeal, molasses, and sowbelly (fat salt pork from the belly of a pig).  Pellagra was especially common in orphanages, sanitariums, asylums, and prisons, according to Burton Hendrick.  Between 1906 and 1940 more than 3 million Americans had pellagra, and more than 100,000 died.  Around the world, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands died from pellagra.

Corn (maize) is an incredibly productive crop.  It is an excellent storage food when the kernels are properly dried.  Corn is deficient in two essential amino acids: lysine and tryptophan.  Native Americans learned that corn was far more nutritious when cooked along with an alkali like lye (leached from wood ashes), or lime (limestone: calcium carbonate).  This unlocked the niacin, making it available to the body.  Treated corn is called hominy.  A diet that includes both hominy and beans is even more nutritious.

Some believe that that the invention of hominy was revolutionary, beginning in the eastern U.S. around A.D. 750 to 800.  It greatly increased carrying capacity, leading to a surge in population, which enabled the rise of Mississippian civilizations like Cahokia and Kinkaid.  On the downside, hominy eaters experienced far more tooth decay.

Scurvy

Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in the diet.  This vitamin is found in many fresh fruits and vegetables, especially citrus fruits, like oranges and lemons.  Potato eaters also get adequate vitamin C.  Before potatoes became a staple in northern regions, scurvy was common in winter months, when fresh foods were unavailable.  Homo sapiens are tropical primates, and if we had remained in tropical regions, scurvy would never have become an issue.

In the old days, when sailors spent months at sea, living on hard biscuits and salted meats, many got scurvy — until the British discovered the healing power of limes, and their sailors got the nickname Limeys (lemons have more C than limes).  After several months of insufficient vitamin C, folks experienced fatigue, and soreness and stiffness of the joints and lower extremities. Then came bleeding gums, loose teeth, bleeding under the skin, and personality changes.  Untreated, bleeding or infections led to death.

Beriberi

Beriberi means “extreme weakness.”  It is caused by a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency, and leads to impairment of the heart and nervous system, in both infants and adults.  It is common where diets major in polished (white) rice, and little else.  The rice husk is removed to greatly extend storage life, but the husk contains thiamine.  Beriberi is still common in some locations, like prisons.  It’s getting less common in Asia, where many are now eating better diets.  Untreated, it can cause death.  Half of the men in the Japanese navy got beriberi before 1880, when extra meat, fish, and veggies were added to their diet.

BACTERIAL DISEASES

Cholera

Cholera originated in tropical regions.  It is a fecal-oral disease caused by bacteria.  Its primary reservoir is marine organisms.  Sources of infection include contaminated food, water, and contact with the feces of cholera victims.  Symptoms can appear as soon as two hours after exposure, and victims sometimes die the same day.  The most common symptom is diarrhea, up to 3 to 5 gallons per day (10 to 20 l).  Once the bacteria enter the water supply, the disease rapidly spreads.

Victims primarily die from dehydration.  When provided with adequate amounts of water, victims often survive.  In severe cases, treatment with antibiotics and hydration can stop the infection.  Some strains of the bacteria have developed multiple drug resistance (MDR) — they can survive exposure to two or more types of antibiotics.  There are vaccines that can prevent cholera, but they do not provide lifelong immunity.

The first cholera pandemic began in Bengal, India, in 1816, and lasted until 1823.  So far, there have been seven global pandemics.  The second global pandemic ran from 1829 to 1851.  It spread to London and Paris.  Cholera was unable to spread to the Americas until 1832, when speedy new steamships enabled the pathogen to survive the voyage.  Once in Canada, it rapidly spread, transported by boats and railroads.  Riverboats carried it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  The Gold Rush migration carried cholera to California, where it unleashed a diarrhea rush in 1850.  Around the world, in the last 200 years, it has killed many millions.  Cholera is still alive and well in the world.

Laurie Garrett revealed a spooky side of cholera.  In water or algae, the bacteria can survive encysted, in a dormant state, for months or years.  In the harbor of Lima, Peru, a Chinese ship dumped bilge water that contained spores of a virulent form of cholera called El Tor (the bull).  People consumed raw shellfish that were contaminated with El Tor, and developed intense diarrhea.  Before El Tor arrived, Peru had stopped chlorinating drinking water, because chlorine increases the risk of cancer.  So, in 1991, El Tor eventually found its way into the water supply, and came out of faucets.  It infected 336,000 people in eleven months, and was carried to the U.S. by infected people who traveled by air.

Cholera is a disease of poor sanitation.  Its spread is encouraged by large populations, dirty water, and by high mobility (airplanes, ships, railroads, etc.).  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.

Typhus

There are several forms of typhus.  Epidemic typhus is a bacterial disease spread by lice.  It originated in temperate regions.  One to three weeks following exposure, flu-like symptoms occur.  Then, five to nine days later, a rash appears, and spreads over most of the body.  “Typhus” means confused, because many victims became delirious.  Without treatment, up to 40 percent die.

Lice transfer the bacteria from infected humans to other humans.  No other animal species is a typhus reservoir.  When a typhus-carrying louse bites, it takes some blood, and leaves behind a small gift of poop.  The bite itches, the person scratches it, and scratching pushes the bacteria through the bite opening in the skin. 

During the Great Famine, many Irish boarded boats to North America.  Joining them for the voyage were lice-ridden rats.  The boats became known as “coffin ships” because they delivered the typhus epidemic of 1847 to North America.  The immigrants were quarantined on their ships, on an island, or held in large “fever sheds.”  Tens of thousands died at sea, or in quarantine. 

Typhus thrives in crowds.  Sometimes it was called jail fever.  It was especially common during wartime.  Soldiers had little access to soap, hot water, baths, or clean clothing.  They had plenty of company from rats and bugs.  Typhus took a big toll during the Russian Revolution (1917–1923), causing 30 million cases with more than 3 million deaths.  During World War Two, scientists discovered that lice could be controlled by spraying the soldiers with DDT.  This kept them bug free for months. 

In the good old days, bathing was considered to be dangerous.  Prior to modern water systems, carrying enough water for a bath was a lot of work.  The whole family took turns using the same bath water.  In the summer, people could bathe in lakes or streams, but the arrival of autumn chilled interest in washing.  In the 1800s, even the rich got typhus, because everyone had lice. 

Typhus can be controlled by better hygiene, insecticides, and antibiotics.  No vaccines are currently available to prevent typhus.  It thrives in conditions of crowding, filth, and poverty — civilization.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.

Typhoid

Typhoid is a bacterial disease that originated in temperate regions.  It is caused by consuming food or water contaminated with fecal material.  Shellfish living in dirty water can carry the bacteria.  So can raw fruit or vegetables fertilized with humanure, or contaminated milk, cheese, or ice cream.  On one milk route in Springfield, Massachusetts, 150 consumers caught typhoid, and 25 died.  Flies can deliver typhoid to your food.  Typhoid declined when motor vehicles replaced horses, and the streets were no longer loaded with manure and flies.

Symptoms appear six to thirty days after exposure, when victims get a high fever that lasts several days, or sometimes months.  The name typhoid means “resembling typhus” because it had similar symptoms.  Not until 1837 did science discover that typhoid and typhus were different diseases.

Mary Mallon carried the typhoid pathogen, but it never made her sick.  Working as a cook, she infected at least 50 people, of whom 3 died.  Earning the nickname Typhoid Mary, she had to be forcibly quarantined for 26 years, which really pissed her off, because she wasn’t ill.

Typhoid is a popular disease in regions where dense populations dump their sewage into their drinking water supplies.  It is also encouraged by flies and filth.  Horses release 15 to 35 pounds of manure daily (7 to 16 kg).  In 1900, London streets were home to 50,000 horses.  New York had 100,000.  Dense clouds of flies feasted on the yummy crap.  The invention of the automobile actually had one benefit — by clearing the streets of horses, there was a sharp reduction in typhoid cases.

Typhoid still exists.  Worldwide there are 21 million cases annually, with 200,000 deaths.  It can be treated with antibiotics, but the bacteria have developed resistance to some of these drugs.  Since 1896, there have been typhoid vaccines, but they don’t provide lifelong immunity.  Good sanitation and chlorinated drinking water can prevent the spread. 

Typhoid thrives in conditions of crowding, filth, and poverty — civilization.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.

Bubonic Plague

Bubonic plague is a bacterial disease that originated in temperate regions.  It first entered history with the Plague of Justinian (541–542) which struck the Eastern Roman Empire, and initially killed about 25 million people.  Grain ships from Egypt carried infected rats to Constantinople (Istanbul), where up to 5,000 people per day died.  The epidemic returned several times over the following 200 years, and eventually killed about 50 million.  In the year 500, the estimated population of the world was between 190 and 206 million.

The second great pandemic was the Black Death, which originated in central Asia, spread through China (1331) and then hammered Europe (1347–1350), possibly killing 50 million, about one third of the people.  Periodic plague outbreaks persisted in Europe for the next 350 years.

The third great pandemic began in Yunnan China in 1855, and spread into India.  It killed 12 million people in China and India, and persisted until 1959.  In 2015, the Centers for Disease Control reported 15 cases of plague in the United States.  Around the world there are several thousand cases each year, and most are cured with antibiotics.  Today, many types of ground dwelling rodents are reservoirs of the pathogen.

Fleas acquire the pathogen by biting the rodents, and then pass it to humans with a bite.  A pustule forms, and then the lymph nodes in the armpits, groin, and/or neck swell.  There is bleeding under the skin, creating purple blotches, or buboes.  Eventually the nervous system breaks down, there is intense pain, and then death — usually on the fourth day.  Death was often preceded by violent fever, vomiting blood, convulsions, and bizarre body movement known as the danse macabre — the dance of death.

Bubonic plague thrives in conditions of crowding, filth, and poverty — civilization.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.  Sometimes it mutated into pneumonic plague, which could be spread to others with a sneeze, was extremely contagious, and always fatal (so outbreaks were brief).

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is an ancient bacterial disease that we may have acquired from ruminants.  The time, place, and way that tuberculosis originated remains the subject of controversy.  Maybe a third of humans are infected with tuberculosis, but most have no symptoms, and are not contagious because their immune systems keep it under control.  If the bacteria grow, a latent infection can become active.  It can then pass directly from person to person via coughing, sneezing, spitting, or speaking.  Symptoms include fever, frequent coughing, night sweats, weight loss, and bloody sputum. 

In the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution spurred the growth of crowded cities, TB was the main cause of death in Europe and North America.  Prime victims were the malnourished who lived in damp conditions.  There was no cure.  In the twentieth century, it killed an estimated 100 million people.  It is quite contagious.  A flight attendant with tuberculosis spread it to 23 passengers during several flights.

Tuberculosis can be treated with antibiotics, but drugs are becoming less effective, because a number of tuberculosis strains are developing multiple drug resistance (MDR), a condition that is common in hospitals, prisons, and homeless shelters.  The World Health Organization reported that in 2014, there were 9.6 million cases of active tuberculosis, which resulted in 1.5 million deaths. 

Of those cases in 2014, 480,000 were MDR-TB, more than half of which occurred in India, China, and Russia.  Of these MDR cases, about 9.7 percent were XDR-TB — extensively drug resistant tuberculosis.  Recently a new variant is emerging, TDR-TB — totally drug resistant tuberculosis, which has been found in India, Iran, and Italy. 

For the last 50 years, there has been little interest in developing new first-line drugs for treating tuberculosis.  TB is a disease that mainly affects the extremely poor; folks who can’t afford to buy highly profitable wonder drugs. 

Tuberculosis thrives in conditions of crowding and poverty — civilization.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.

Anthrax

Anthrax is an ancient bacterial disease that primarily infects plant-eating mammals, especially animals that live in herds, like horses, cattle, sheep, bison, reindeer, and oxen.  Anthrax is spooky because it creates spores that can survive for centuries, even in harsh conditions.  Birds that dine on infected carcasses can move the spores to other regions.  Moving streams can carry spores downstream.  Spores have been found on every continent, including Antarctica.

Humans and other animals can become infected by inhaling spores, or eating contaminated meat.  Humans can get it by handling wool or hides.  Bacteria can enter via broken skin.  Once a dormant spore has entered the body, it can reactivate and spur an infection. 

Michaeleen Doucleff reported on an anthrax outbreak in a remote region of Siberia, where melting permafrost exposed a reindeer that died from anthrax 75 years earlier.  Old spores from the dead reindeer then led to the infection of 2,000 reindeer, dozens of people got sick, and one child died.  Because livestock are a primary source of food for humans, high mortality in the animals can lead to starvation.  When traction animals die, fields can’t be plowed.

Prior to 1900, hundreds of thousands of people died from anthrax every year.  The disease cannot be transmitted human-to-human, but when someone dies from it, the mass of bacilli in the corpse can become a source for infection.  The first effective vaccine was developed in 1881.  A second generation is available now, but has severe side effects in one percent of patients.  The disease is treatable with antibiotics.

Anthrax is encouraged by the confinement of animal herds, like in livestock operations.  Anthrax in humans is encouraged by regularly having close contact with herd animals.  It was probably less common among our nomadic wild ancestors.  Finding a bunch of dead animals may have encouraged caution.

PARASITIC DISEASES

Humans are tropical primates, and parasites thrive in a tropical climate that is close to our body temperature.  In a warm environment, it is easier for them to move between humans and other animals.  One in every four humans provides a nice home and warm meals for parasitic worms.  Parasitic diseases can cause chronic, long-term, debilitating conditions.

Our wild ancestors in tropical regions certainly had intimate relationships with parasites, but probably on a scale far less than today.  The tropics have been substantially disrupted by logging, herding, agriculture, poverty, poor sanitation, and explosive population growth.  A warming climate suggests a bright future for the parasites.

Because tropical climates don’t have cold winters, they nurture greater biodiversity, which provides prime conditions for parasitic diseases.  Parasites include protozoans, roundworms, flatworms, filarial worms, and amoeba.  We’ll take a closer look at a few parasitic diseases in the following pages. 

Malaria

For humans, the deadliest creatures on Earth are not large carnivores, but mosquitoes.  Malaria is an ancient tropical disease caused by protozoans that are transmitted to humans via mosquitoes.  The disease destroys red blood cells, and an infection can last for years.  There are five varieties of malaria, caused by five different parasites.  The most deadly variety is caused by Plasmodium falciparum, which originated in birds.  Humans provide the sole reservoir for malaria parasites, and mosquitoes transfer them from the infected to the non-infected, so dense population encourages the disease.

Following exposure, the incubation period is 7 to 30 days.  Early symptoms include fever, chills, headache, sweats, fatigue, nausea, and vomiting.  Complications can include brain infection, kidney failure, liver problems, pulmonary edema, coma, and death.  Some believe that malaria has killed more people than any other disease.

Mark Nathan Cohen noted that malaria and yellow fever were originally treetop diseases that infected non-human primates.  As humans cleared forests for agriculture, they became vulnerable to these diseases.  Malaria was rare among nomadic people, but common in farming communities, especially where rice was grown in flooded paddies (mosquito incubators).

Malaria and yellow fever were transferred to the Americas via the slave trade.  In 1864, George Perkins Marsh noted that malaria followed deforestation.  In Virginia and the Carolinas, malaria was rare in forested areas, but common in cleared places, especially near the flooded rice paddies in South Carolina and Georgia.  He wrote, “The cultivation of rice is so prejudicial to health everywhere that nothing but the necessities of a dense population can justify the sacrifice of life it costs in countries where it is pursued.”

John Perlin described how the ancient Greeks cleared forests to create wheat fields.  Deforestation led to severe erosion that filled deep harbors with soil, creating malarial marshes.  Malaria was so bad that port cities had to be abandoned.

The ancient Romans repeated the same mistake.  For centuries, wealthy Romans spent their summers at higher elevations to avoid malaria.  Geoffrey Marks noted that in the eleventh century, the Germans who conquered Rome declared it to be uninhabitable, and abandoned it.  For centuries, malaria made Rome almost uninhabitable in the summers, until Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes in the 1930s.

Today, a billion people live in malaria country.  Mosquitoes are developing resistance to insecticides, and the malarial parasites are developing resistance to every antimalarial drug.  No vaccines are available.  Malaria is untreatable in some regions.  The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2010 there were 219 million cases of malaria (mostly in Africa), resulting in an estimated 660,000 deaths.  WHO models indicate that a global temperature rise of 2 to 3°C will put 3 to 5 percent more people at risk of malaria (several hundred million).

Margaret Humphreys noted that three types of malaria were imported to the U.S. by immigrants from Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and African slaves.  It spread as far north as Tennessee and North Carolina.  Slaves and mosquitoes mingled together in flooded rice fields in South Carolina, and then the mosquitoes infected whites.  By the 1680s, whites were getting hit hard, especially the young.  Many families fled north during the summer months.

Schistosomiasis

Schistosomiasis (bilharzia) is the second most common parasitic disease, after malaria.  It is caused by parasitic worms that live in freshwater snails.  The worms emerge from the snails and burrow through the skin of humans standing in the water, often in irrigated fields.  These worms can live in your body for 40 years.  As their eggs move through your organs, they cause bleeding.  Infection sometimes results in bladder cancer, and liver disease.  The parasite returns to the water in the feces of victims.  It’s nearly impossible to eliminate the snails, but medications can eliminate worm infestations in the body.  Where schistosomiasis is common, many die young. 

Sleeping Sickness

Sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) is a tropical disease that originated in Africa.  It is caused by a family of protozoa named Trypanosoma brucei.  Originally, sleeping sickness was transferred from wild antelopes to humans via tsetse flies.  The protozoa did not sicken the antelope.  Amazingly, the tsetse can drink its own weight in blood in seconds.

For a long while, humans were little affected by sleeping sickness, because they didn’t live in close contact with wild animals.  But, once upon a time, the herders of domesticated cattle got really tired of living in warm and green ecosystems, because they were hotbeds of malaria.  So, to escape from the mosquito hordes, they packed up and moved to a dryer region — tsetse country. 

In tsetse country, the native African wild mammals were resistant to the disease, but livestock brought in from elsewhere were not.  Cattle and herders were infected with sleeping sickness, and the cattle were hit extremely hard.  Slave traders carried the sleeping sickness protozoa to uninfected regions. 

The disease messes up the mind and body in many ways, but the most obvious symptom is that victims sleep a lot, and can be very difficult to awaken.  Left untreated, all victims fall into a coma and die.  There are two forms of sleeping sickness, caused by two different types of protozoa.  More than 98 percent of the cases are caused by the weaker one, which can take three years to kill the victim.  The stronger form is more virulent, killing the victim within months.

In 1859, a sleeping sickness epidemic around Lake Chad was so severe that the town of Digazore, Nigeria was deserted for 50 years.  Between 1896 and 1906, sleeping sickness killed 500,000 in the Congo.  Between 1898 and 1908, it killed 200,000 of the 300,000 living along the northeast shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda.  In 1952, Charles Winslow wrote that most of Tanganyika was uninhabitable because of the large tsetse fly belt.

In numerous tsetse hotbeds, trying to graze cattle was not worth the effort, because too many died.  People had to get their protein via foods from elsewhere.  On the plus side, the flies protected the indigenous wildlife.  William McNeill wrote, “It is mainly because sleeping sickness was and remains so devastating to human populations that the ungulate herds of the African savanna have survived to the present.”

Insecticides cannot eliminate the tsetse flies because they inhabit large regions.  Eliminating the wildlife that are hosts to the parasites is not an option.  Health experts expect that a warming climate is likely to open up new frontiers for tsetse flies.  Currently, they are only in Africa. 

River Blindness

River blindness (onchocerciasis) is caused by an infestation of filarial worms that colonize the eyeballs.  In some areas of Africa, up to 30 percent of adults are blind.  Humans acquire the parasites via bites from black flies, which breed in warm rivers.  The flies are hard to exterminate, because some can travel up to 400 miles (640 km) in one day.

Elephantiasis

Lymphatic filariasis is commonly known as elephantiasis.  When humans donate blood to mosquitoes and black flies, the insects transmit roundworms to the humans.  Infection usually occurs in childhood, and eventually results in damage to the lymphatic system.  Untreated, the legs and scrotum of the victims can swell to enormous size.  Drug therapy and surgery can treat worm infestations.  Intensive insecticide spraying can reduce the flies and mosquitoes.

Chagas’ Disease

Chagas’ disease is caused by parasite named Trypanosoma cruzi.  This protozoa is usually spread by kissing bugs, and it has a reservoir in wild and domestic animals.  The bugs first bite an infected person, then bite a healthy person, and dump some feces by the bite.  Scratching the bite rubs the feces into the wound, and the parasites move into their new home, where they might reside for decades.  Some victims experience cardiac or intestinal complications.  Chagas’ disease is common in Mexico, Central America, and South America.  Seven to eight million have the disease, and it causes 12,500 deaths per year. 

VIRAL DISEASES

Viruses are not living organisms.  They are segments of protein-coated genetic material (DNA or RNA) that can infect the living cells of plants, animals, or bacteria.  When infected cells reproduce, the offspring carry the virus.  There are millions of types of viruses.

They can be transmitted by insects, coughing and sneezing, feces, body fluids, person-to-person contact, or via eating or drinking.  Some viruses can infect the cells of a few different species, and others can infect many.

Yellow Fever

Yellow fever is a tropical disease caused by a mosquito-borne virus.  The virus originated in forest primates, who remain the primary hosts.  It is a hemorrhagic fever.  About 15 percent of victims advance to the second phase of the disease, in which they bleed from the mouth and eyes, and vomit blood.  Without treatment, up to 20 percent of victims die.  This can increase to 50 percent in severe epidemics.

The Aedes aegypti species of mosquitoes carries the yellow fever virus.  A tropical village could go decades without a case of yellow fever, because the mosquitoes stayed in the jungle, feeding on marmosets and monkeys.  Cutting a stand of trees could spark an epidemic, by bringing mosquitoes closer to the ground, to breed in pools of water on the stumps. 

Aedes aegypti can’t survive in a chilly climate.  They have migrated out of Africa, and now enjoy life in tropical and subtropical regions around the world.  They are thrilled to hear news about global warming, and they urge all humans to increase their carbon-emitting habits, please!  Drive like crazy!  Fly everywhere!  Recently, they have been found as far north as Sacramento and New York City.  Yellow fever was far less common in the days before our ancestors became forest molesters, farmers, and city folks. 

There is no cure for yellow fever, but a preventive vaccine was developed in 1938.  Over time many Africans have developed immunity to it, and can carry the virus without getting sick.  Non-Africans have not been so lucky; they die like flies when the virus comes to visit.  Anyway, when the good white Christians brought African slaves to the New World, yellow fever came with them.  Neither Native Americans nor white colonists had any immunity at all.  A virgin land epidemic exploded. 

Yellow fever was the reason why the United States got a fabulous bargain on the Louisiana Purchase, which included the territory of fifteen future states.  In 1802, Napoleon sent an army to Haiti to put down a rebellion.  He enjoyed a smashing victory over the rebels, whilst the Haitian mosquitoes took great pleasure in killing 40,000 of his men with yellow fever.  At this point, the mighty emperor lost all interest for further adventures in the frightfully unhealthy continent of North America, and he sold French claims to the USA for a bargain price.

Geoffrey Marks reported that there were epidemics in the U.S. northeast from 1686 to 1832, but it was far more prevalent in the south.  For example, epidemics hit Charleston, South Carolina in 1699, 1706, 1711, 1728, 1732, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1795, 1798, and 1799.  In 1820, one-third of the people in Savannah, Georgia died.  Forest clearing and numerous rice paddies provided abundant habitat for mosquitoes.  Today, vaccines keep the disease under control in many regions.

Influenza

Influenza is a viral disease that originated in temperate regions.  It can be highly contagious, and some variants can be highly lethal.  It often mutates into new variants, and many experts are concerned that a new deadly influenza pandemic is quite likely, at some point in time.

It’s odd that many people have heard about the Black Death pandemic of 650 years ago, but far fewer know about the global influenza pandemic of 1918.  We prefer to forget it.  At a time when world population was about 1.7 billion, the flu infected 500 million, and 50 to 100 million died.  It spread around the world in just two months, in an era before commercial air travel.  Doctors were helpless to treat it.  Some feared the end of civilization.

After a few days of aches and pains, victims would start bleeding from their ears, nose, or eyes.  Their lungs filled with blood, and their skin turned purple.  Some called it the Purple Death.  Folks that appeared healthy at breakfast were dead by evening.  Oddly, mortality was highest among healthy adults between the ages of 20 to 40.  Some believe that the flu didn’t kill them.  They died because their healthy immune systems freaked out, flooded their bodies with proteins that caused inflammation.  Children and old folks had less robust immune systems, and survived in greater numbers. 

Richard Collier wrote an unforgettable play-by-play description of the 1918 pandemic, taken from news accounts of the day.  Quarantines didn’t work because infected people can appear healthy for a few days.  In 1918, ships known to be carrying infected people were allowed to enter ports.  The SS Niagara took infected passengers to New Zealand, resulting in 6,680 deaths.  The Canadian Pacific railroad carried the flu across the continent, infecting each city where the train stopped.  Some victims went into deep comas, with no pulse or breathing — and then revived in their closed coffin.

Dr. Michael Greger wrote that wild ducks and influenza viruses peacefully lived together for 100 million years.  If humans had never domesticated ducks, influenza might be unknown today.  Unfortunately, ducks were domesticated 4,500 years ago in China, moved onto rice paddies, where they were close to chickens, pigs, and humans that were not immune to the viruses.  Because China raises 13 billion chickens, 2 billion waterfowl, and 500 million hogs in close contact with humans and other species, it provides perfect conditions for encouraging the mutation of viruses, and their spread to other species.

When a highly lethal, highly contagious mutant emerges, wild migratory birds can carry it to faraway regions, like North America, via Alaska.  They poop in the water, and other species acquire the viruses when drinking.  It’s vital that we change the way we raise animals, but there is little interest.  Especially bad are Chinese fish farms where hog, chicken, and human wastes are used as feed.

When the next highly contagious, highly lethal variant appears, existing vaccines may not prevent it.  Flu viruses can rapidly mutate, creating a moving target for vaccine makers.  Creating a new vaccine can take six to eight months.  Then it has to be mass produced and distributed.  By then, the pandemic will be over. 

Influenza is the result of animal domestication.  Its spread is encouraged by dense populations, high mobility, and living with others indoors.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.  The last words of one 1918 flu victim in Guatemala were, “We die of the blessings of civilization.”

Smallpox

Smallpox is a viral disease that originated in temperate regions.  It is highly contagious and highly lethal, especially in children under two years old.  It does not spare the wealthy.  Smallpox is transmitted via face-to-face contact, exposure to infected body fluids, or by touching contaminated items like clothing or bedding.  Following exposure, the incubation period is 10 to 14 days, which allowed infected people to travel to distant villages before discovering they were sick.

Symptoms include fever, headache, fatigue, back pain, and vomiting.  Red spots then spread over the body, then turn into small blisters, which turn into scabs, and then leave behind deep pitted scars.  Most victims over ten years old survive, but some varieties of smallpox are almost always fatal.  Once infected, there is no cure, but the symptoms can be treated. 

There is evidence that smallpox existed before 1000 B.C. in Egypt, India, and China.  It may have appeared much earlier.  Many believe that the virus originated in cows, but others suspect camels.  Travelers from Eurasia carried the virus to the Americas and Australia, where natives had zero immunity and suffered fatality rates up to 90 percent.  In the twentieth century, an estimated 300 to 500 million people died from smallpox.

No other animal provides a reservoir for the smallpox virus.  Only humans carried it.  Because of this, science was able to eradicate the disease via a successful vaccination program.  Smallpox was eradicated in the U.S. in 1972, and the last case occurred in Somalia in 1977. 

Smallpox almost certainly was a consequence of the animal domestication.  Experts do not agree on the source, but most say camels, and some say cattle.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.  They probably never experienced it.

Rinderpest

Rinderpest is a viral disease that affects ruminants — hoofed animals like cattle, goats, sheep, antelopes, deer, and giraffes.  It is the most virulent of all livestock diseases.  Because livestock are a primary source of food for humans, high mortality in the animals can lead to starvation in humans.  When beasts of burden die, fields can’t be plowed, and carts do not move.

Rinderpest is highly contagious and has high mortality rates.  When an animal is infected, it takes 3 to 15 days for symptoms to appear.  They include high fever, diarrhea, and skin lesions.  Death follows in 6 to 12 days.  All of a sick animal’s fluids are contagious, including tears, urine, saliva, snot, and excrement.

Andrew Rimas noted that the virus apparently originated in East Asia.  Mongols carried it west to the Ukraine in 1240, and it eventually spread as far as Scotland.  In 1865, a rinderpest epidemic in Europe killed up to 200 million cattle.  In 1885, infected cattle were shipped by Italian soldiers to Eritrea, and by 1890, 92 percent of the cattle in East Africa were dead.  It took a similar toll on wild ruminants, like buffalo, bison, oryx, elands, and the greater kudu.  The Maasai are a tribe of cattle herders, and two-thirds of them perished from starvation.  Large feline predators starved.  In the absence of large herbivores, trees began to spread into the savannah.

The rinderpest virus likely originated in wild herd animals, and it is likely more than 5,000 years old.  It’s closely related to the measles virus, and is probably older.  Human populations were not large enough to maintain endemic measles until a thousand years ago.  Humans can’t get rinderpest, and other animals can’t get measles.  In 2011, rinderpest went extinct in the wild, because of a successful vaccination program.

Rinderpest thrived in dense populations of confined domesticated livestock.  Our nomadic wild ancestors probably did not observe often it among wild ruminants, if ever.

Measles

Measles is a highly infectious viral disease that originated in temperate regions.  It spreads from person to person via coughs and sneezes.  Ten to twelve days after exposure, symptoms appear, including inflamed eyes, fever, cough, and runny nose.  Three to five days after the start of symptoms, a red rash spreads over the body, beginning at the face.  Complications include pneumonia, brain inflammation, blindness, and diarrhea. 

Most of those who survive a measles infection will be immune for the rest of their lives.  Therefore, measles needs a continuous supply of victims who are not immune, namely young children.  Of those who are not immune, about ninety percent will become infected when exposed to the virus. 

Humans are the sole reservoir for measles.  It cannot persist in populations of less than 250,000 to 500,000 people, it will die out.  Measles was first noted in written records in the tenth century, as European cities grew to densities sufficient to provide a good home for the virus.

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey notes, “It has been estimated that between 1840 and 1990, measles killed about 200 million people worldwide.”  A measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.  Once upon a time, the World Health Organization hoped to eliminate measles by 2020.

Measles thrives in dense populations and poverty.  It would not have been common among our nomadic wild ancestors.

NEW VIRAL DISEASES

New types of viral diseases are now appearing, as humans move deeper into remote areas of the tropics.  Loggers are destroying forests, and bush meat hunters are selling a variety of wild primates for food.  Because humans are Old World primates, we are more vulnerable to the diseases of other Old World primates, like Ebola, Marburg, and AIDS.  We are less closely related to the monkeys of the Americas, so we are not so susceptible to their diseases.

Viruses are notorious for having a tendency to mutate, like the influenza virus.  Wild monkeys are susceptible to a highly lethal airborne virus that gives them cancer.  The virus has not mutated into a form that humans are vulnerable to — yet.  Ebola and Marburg are highly lethal, but the viruses that cause them have not succeeded in permanently established themselves in human populations — yet.  Folks who work in labs with monkeys are getting monkey diseases.  Idiots have experimented with transplanting baboon organs into humans.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is contagious.  When it is untreated, it can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease that has killed about 40 million.  HIV is probably a mutation of the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) which is carried harmlessly by chimps.  The bushmeat business now operates at an industrial scale, and bushmeat vendors are often exposed to the blood of SIV infected chimps.  The first well-documented case of AIDS was in 1959 in the Congo.  By the late 1970s, HIV was in the U.S.  It spread rapidly among the gay community.  HIV researchers at the National Institutes of Health had to keep redefining the meaning of “multiple sex partners.”  It was 20 partners per year in 1975, 50 in 1976, 100 in 1978, and 500 in 1980.  One fun-loving lad claimed 3,000.

Ebola hemorrhagic fever is a viral disease of humans and other primates.  It is active in tropical Africa, and outbreaks tend to occur when heavy rains follow a long dry spell.  In advanced stages of the infection, victims bleed internally and externally.  The virus is transmitted via skin-to-skin contact, and exposure to patient’s body fluids and excretions.  Usually, mortality is 50 percent, but can run as high as 90 percent.  Fruit bats are the likely reservoir of the virus, which does not make them sick.  A recent epidemic in West Africa ran from 2013 to 2016, with 28,657 cases and 11,325 deaths.

Marburg hemorrhagic fever is a deadly viral disease that infects humans and non-human primates.  It is active in the arid woodlands of equatorial Africa, and fruit bats are the reservoir for the virus.  It typically infects people who visit bat-infested caves, or work in mines.  It is transmitted via skin-to-skin contact, and exposure to patient’s body fluids and excretions.  Its symptoms are the same as Ebola.  Victims die from the failure of multiple organs, not hemorrhage.  A severe outbreak in Angola in 2004–2005 had a mortality rate of 90 percent.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved no vaccines for Marburg.

SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) is a viral disease first identified in 2003.  Symptoms appear two to ten days after contact, with fever and respiratory problems.  Severe cases can result in respiratory failure.  In 2003, nine percent of all victims died.  For those older than 50, almost half died.  Scientists believe that it was passed to humans via palm civets, animals sold for human consumption in Guangdong, China.  It has also been found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers, and domestic cats.  The natural reservoir for the virus may be bats, which carry it harmlessly.  The virus is apparently transferred when different species are in close contact, as they are in Chinese markets — conditions far different from normal life in the wild.

Lassa hemorrhagic fever is a viral disease of humans and non-human primates.  It is endemic in western Africa, where it infects 100,000 to 300,000 each year, and kills about 5,000.  The reservoir for the virus is a type of rat that commonly colonizes human settlements, and feeds on stored food.  Infected rats excrete the virus in their urine and feces.  Humans are infected via inhalation, open wounds, or ingestion of contaminated foods.  Most infections are mild and not diagnosed, but twenty percent can get serious.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved no vaccines for the Lassa virus. 

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a viral disease that triggered a global pandemic in early 2020.  It has the potential to become catastrophic.  The future has yet to be written.

DEGENERATIVE DISEASE

Wikipedia lists some examples of degenerative diseases — cancer, heart disease, diabetes, macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, and many more.

I’m not going to say much about these diseases, because they are all around us, fully out in the open, and I’ve already said enough to express my views about health among the wild and non-wild.  I’m wary about sharing long term health trend statistics, because they are probably inaccurate and misleading.

In 2007, Clive Ponting wrote that one in three Americans contracts cancer, compared with one in 27 in 1900.  Many folks who died in 1900, in big cities and rural farmhouses, were not included in regional or national records of cancer deaths.  Not all regions kept records.  Back in the simpler days of paper and fountain pen technology, if an elderly person did not die violently, the death was likely attributed to “natural causes.”  Nothing to see here.  Have a nice day!

So, I’m going to share one source I trust, and call it a day.  Over many years, journalist John Gunther travelled 40,000 miles in Africa, and visited most of the 44 countries or political subdivisions, including 105 towns.  He interviewed many experts and officials, and wrote a 950 page book, which was published in 1953.

When he was in the Sahara region, he wrote: “At the El Goléa hospital the resident doctor told us that, in ten years, he has never had a case of appendicitis in a native, or seen a cancer.  Elsewhere in Africa we subsequently found doctors who reported this same extraordinary thing.”  In Bantu country, he wrote: “Cancer is almost unknown among the Africans, and diseases of filth, like cholera and plague, are uncommon.”  In French Equatorial Africa, he wrote: “Dr. Albert Schweitzer has never seen appendicitis in an African; and cancer is virtually unknown.”