2 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

Neither, high IM is obviously not healthy

Really? evolution seems to disagree...

25 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Really? evolution seems to disagree...

High infant mortality is healthy? Not for the infants, they are part of humanity.

Or do you mean for humanity in terms of only the robust individuals surviving therefore only "strong" genes are passed on?

Say a kid is not great at beating malaria but may have the intellectual capacity to crack fusion, cancer, climate change initiatives or a more peaceful, productive, nurturing and caring world?

We lose that kid but at least we get the next top line backer?

5 minutes ago, pinball1970 said:

High infant mortality is healthy? Not for the infants, they are part of humanity.

So are the adults... 😉

3 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

So are the adults... 😉

Another thread I think.

1 minute ago, pinball1970 said:

Another thread I think.

propose the topic...

7 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

propose the topic...

You brought it up, this about infant mortality in the middle ages.

Politics, sociology, ethics and philosophy not really my aim in this forum.

Feel free to start a thread, I may contribute.

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

Largely the same ones we have around us today, though we have eliminated a handful of them, e.g. smallpox.

Some have become less potent, and some have all but disappeared, but new ones pop up.

26 minutes ago, swansont said:

Some have become less potent, and some have all but disappeared, but new ones pop up.

Ha, don’t we know it! I suppose I had in mind things like pneumonia, scarlet fever, typhoid, malaria, plus complications from measles and other childhood classics.

34 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Ha, don’t we know it! I suppose I had in mind things like pneumonia, scarlet fever, typhoid, malaria, plus complications from measles and other childhood classics.

Right. But the details of what specific pathogens were involved matters only a little; the important thing in regard to the OP’s inquiry is that there wasn’t much in the way of treatment or prevention

2 hours ago, dimreepr said:

Really? evolution seems to disagree...

Don’t anthropomorphize nature. She hates that.

Healthy doesn’t enter into this equation. Evolution is not “looking out” for any species. Every disease or malady we’ve suffered from throughout most of human history is a product of evolution (the only possible exceptions being very recent)

7 hours ago, studiot said:

This explanation and maps of the current situation explain why modern medicine is important and why the plague was so devasting to the Roman empire and in the Middle ages.

Plague

About Plague

Plague is a disease that affects humans and other mammals, caused by the bacterium, <em>Yersinia pestis</em>.

Plague

Maps and Statistics

Human plague still occurs in the western US, with most cases in northern New Mexico and Arizona.

It is one of the examples I love to show in class. Also in quite a few soil samples you will occasionally come across Y. pestis (probably also one of the reasons why you find them in ground squirrels and prairie dogs and other ground dwellers).

19 hours ago, swansont said:

Don’t anthropomorphize nature. She hates that.

Healthy doesn’t enter into this equation. Evolution is not “looking out” for any species. Every disease or malady we’ve suffered from throughout most of human history is a product of evolution (the only possible exceptions being very recent)

You're right, health is a different equation, and as soon as I figure out the question, you can expect a new topic...

A new YT video published only yesterday offers a concise (8m) account of recent research into the origins of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death which killed between 50-60% of the entire population of western Europe between 1346 and 1353.

A joint study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany has traced the genome of Yersinia pestis to a ‘ground-zero’ grave site near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan which was on the northern route of the Silk Road.

https://www.mpg.de/18778852/0607-evan-origins-of-the-black-death-identified-150495-x

The ancient grave site was part of a Nestorian Christian trading settlement first discovered by a Russian archaeological expedition in 1886 which excavated the site and brought skeletal remains back to St Petersburg.  Grave-stone inscriptions indicated that 118 of the the graves dated 1338-9 were marked as victims of pestilence - almost 10 years before  the first appearance of the plague in Europe.

DNA analysis has confirmed that Yersinia pestis found in skeletal remains from the Lake Issyk Kul site is the ancestral mother strain of the four known mutations of the bacterium, one of which devastated Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLNxIf2lXk

2 hours ago, toucana said:

A new YT video published only yesterday offers a concise (8m) account of recent research into the origins of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death which killed between 50-60% of the entire population of western Europe between 1346 and 1353.

A joint study led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany has traced the genome of Yersinia pestis to a ‘ground-zero’ grave site near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan which was on the northern route of the Silk Road.

https://www.mpg.de/18778852/0607-evan-origins-of-the-black-death-identified-150495-x

The ancient grave site was part of a Nestorian Christian trading settlement first discovered by a Russian archaeological expedition in 1886 which excavated the site and brought skeletal remains back to St Petersburg.  Grave-stone inscriptions indicated that 118 of the the graves dated 1338-9 were marked as victims of pestilence - almost 10 years before  the first appearance of the plague in Europe.

DNA analysis has confirmed that Yersinia pestis found in skeletal remains from the Lake Issyk Kul site is the ancestral mother strain of the four known mutations of the bacterium, one of which devastated Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLNxIf2lXk

Very interesting indeed. And yet another zoonotic disease of course, something many of us are more aware of nowadays than a decade ago.

But, to be clear, this is not the origin of Yersinia pestis itself, just of the strain that gave rise to the Black Death. There have been earlier plague outbreaks in human history, e.g the Plague of Justinian, in ~500AD. And according to Wiki, there is DNA evidence of Yersinia pestis infection in specimens from the Eurasian Bronze Age, back to 5000BC or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis

Edited August 5Aug 5 by exchemist

In the US we still get incidents of plague in the West/Southwest, usually due to a lapse in rodent control in a house. Someone in Arizona died of the pneumonic form of YP last month. Anywhere in the West, we get advisories to make sure we treat our pets for fleas and discourage their roaming in wild areas so that won't be a vector from the wild rodents. And if you find a dead rodent, you use a long-handled implement to dispose of it.

On 8/3/2025 at 5:19 PM, exchemist said:

Ha, don’t we know it! I suppose I had in mind things like pneumonia, scarlet fever, typhoid, malaria, plus complications from measles and other childhood classics.

Might we expect those historically most significant threats to survival to leave some evidence in the genome? If so then conditions such as lactose tolerance and sickle cell anaemia point the finger of suspicion towards famine and malaria as persistent offenders.

11 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

Might we expect those historically most significant threats to survival to leave some evidence in the genome? If so then conditions such as lactose tolerance and sickle cell anaemia point the finger of suspicion towards famine and malaria as persistent offenders.

Interesting idea. I don't know whether signs of resistance to particularly virulent diseases might be recognisable in the genome. Perhaps @CharonY would know. But food shortage in the cold winters of N Eurasia may well be what bred lactose tolerance in only the people living in that part of the world.

I wonder when cheese was invented. That must have been a crucial step in winter provisioning. But I am leading us off-topic for the thread.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

...But I am leading us off-topic for the thread.

Not at all. The thread has so far omitted famine and malnutrition which I would have thought outstripped any disease, even malaria, as historic causes of premature death.

Btw Psalms 90:10 rather famously states the natural lifespan of mankind as 'three score years and ten', so the idea of individuals in their thirties or forties as being 'old' doesn't really tie in with the record.

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

I wonder when cheese was invented. That must have been a crucial step in winter provisioning. But I am leading us off-topic for the thread.

The invention of cheese is believed to predate recorded human history. Some early artefacts that resemble sieves have been found in eastern Europe which are thought  to be cheese strainers at least 7000 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cheese

The general assumption is that the craft of cheesemaking developed with the growth of dairy-herding which became widely established some 4000 years ago. One suggestion is that humans discovered cheese by accident when using the stomachs of ruminants to store and transport milk - and found that rennet in the stomachs curdled the milk.

The use of salt in early cheesemaking varied according to climate. Hard salted cheeses developed in hotter areas, because it was the only viable method of storing milk products there for any length of time. Cooler European climates encouraged the use of less salt which in turn encouraged the presence of useful microbes and moulds that led to the development of blue cheeses.

Cheesemaking is described in Sumerian cuneiform texts from the second millenium BC. Linear B tablets of the Minoan civilization in Crete in the late bronze age refer to it as well - the Minoan word  for cheese Turo was  borrowed into ancient Greek as τυρός . Thereafter cheesemaking is widely described in the Roman empire and in Homer’s Odyssey, and later on in the Arab world as well.

One of the few major civilizations that doesn’t have a dairy-centric tradition of cheesemaking is central China. To this day, Han Chinese people are distinctly averse to cheese products - especially blue cheeses like Gorgonzola.

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

Interesting idea. I don't know whether signs of resistance to particularly virulent diseases might be recognisable in the genome. Perhaps @CharonY would know. But food shortage in the cold winters of N Eurasia may well be what bred lactose tolerance in only the people living in that part of the world.

It depends a bit on the specific question. For example, do we see evidence of genomic adaptation to certain conditions? If so, then I would say yes. The issue is of course that we cannot say for certain, as we cannot really replay the past. Sethoflagos mentioned malaria, and the evidence we have is that a) alleles for sickle cell are more common in areas where malaria is found and b) there is a plausible mechanism for resistance against this pathogen where it was found that folks that are heterozygote are less likely to die from malaria (but homozygous folks, who are therefore symptomatic for sickle cell anemia) are at increased risk. Now, sickle-cell is a very popular example to teach human genetics for a number of reasons and perspectives, but there are a lot of other variants, associated with malaria including other variants of the HBB that do not associated with sickle-cell disease or other mutations that can cause other blood disorders (e.g. alpha thalassemia, which is caused by dysregulation of HBA, IIIRC, but also mutations in a chemokine receptor resulting in the absence of the Duffy antigen, which is used to enter cells by Plasmodium vivax (one of the parasites causing malaria). I am sure there are more that I cannot remember anymore.

For other diseases it is a bit trickier, as few have this long, persistent and very strong selective pressure on human population.

For example, there is the CCR5-Delta32 deletion mutation which confers resistance HIV. It arose very recently and has reached very high frequencies in Europe, suggesting that it is under positive selection. However, despite the nice narrative regarding HIV-resistance, HIV is actually not around for long enough to put enough pressure on the population to reach the measured frequencies. I.e. it can be tricky to figure out the true origin of genomic signatures.

But there is also a more direct story. We carry quite a few viral sequences in our genome and while there can be many different reasons for their presence, one hypothesis is that some might have protective properties for example by competition with viral copies, inhibit synthesis of the "correct" product or somehow otherwise mess with viral functions.

6 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Not at all. The thread has so far omitted famine and malnutrition

Replies one and five.

6 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Btw Psalms 90:10 rather famously states

It famously states that Methuselah lived for nearly 1000 years too.

7 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Not at all. The thread has so far omitted famine and malnutrition which I would have thought outstripped any disease, even malaria, as historic causes of premature death.

Maybe, but I am not entirely sure. The issue here is that whether there are populations that have sufficiently different famine rates so that we can spot potential selection. And obviously finding mechanistic evidence is going to be tricky as metabolic or other adaptations to famine are going to be more diffuse.

One of the elements that folks have focused on is our propensity for obesity (i.e. storing fat). There is the hypothesis that most humanity is hunger-adapted in the first place. Now, there are populations who appear to struggle more for obesity and that potentially populations with very high rates of obesity might have genomic signatures of extreme adaptations to famines.

However, these were arguments made when there was a rush for the human genome and a desire to look at things through an overly genetic lens with the expectation that high-throughput GWAS would yield terrific insights (the "thrifty genotype" was such an example) . I have not followed up on that, but I am aware that a couple areas of inquiry were pretty much just so stories with little supporting evidence. And I think folks have begun to be a bit more skeptical in the way genetic information have to be contextualized.

What infections are you talking about back in that time?

These infections 5 ancient diseases and what the ancients said about them https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/5-ancient-diseases-and-what-ancients-said-about-them

Or these 14 Diseases Nearly Eliminated by Vaccines https://resources.healthgrades.com/right-care/vaccines/14-diseases-nearly-eliminated-by-vaccines

2 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

It famously states that Methuselah lived for nearly 1000 years too.

There's significant well-documented evidence that Plato lived to at least 75. Aristotle deceased at 62. Pythagoras ~75. Socrates ~71. Aristophanes ~60. Thales of Miletus >=77. Archimedes ~75. Plutarch ~80. Epicurus ~71. Diogenes >=79. Zeno of Citium ~72. Zeno of Elea ~60. Zeno of Sidon ~75. Crates of Thebes ~80.

All three score years and ten give or take. There are exceptions: Eudoxus of Cnidus appears to have died at the tender age of 50; Pyrrho of Elis and Hippocrates of Kos appear to have both reached 90 years. And 'all the classical Greek thinkers that spring to mind early on a Wednsday morning' is not exactly a random dataset. However, it does seem to indicate that during the first millenium BCE, if someone survived into their thirties and had a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, they had a reasonable chance of reaching 70.

1 hour ago, Moon99 said:

What infections are you talking about back in that time?

These infections 5 ancient diseases and what the ancients said about them https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/5-ancient-diseases-and-what-ancients-said-about-them

Or these 14 Diseases Nearly Eliminated by Vaccines https://resources.healthgrades.com/right-care/vaccines/14-diseases-nearly-eliminated-by-vaccines

What time?

If you have read the thread you will already know what diseases we have been talking about.

9 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

There's significant well-documented evidence that Plato lived to at least 75. Aristotle deceased at 62. Pythagoras ~75. Socrates ~71. Aristophanes ~60. Thales of Miletus >=77. Archimedes ~75. Plutarch ~80. Epicurus ~71. Diogenes >=79. Zeno of Citium ~72. Zeno of Elea ~60. Zeno of Sidon ~75. Crates of Thebes ~80.

All three score years and ten give or take. There are exceptions: Eudoxus of Cnidus appears to have died at the tender age of 50; Pyrrho of Elis and Hippocrates of Kos appear to have both reached 90 years. And 'all the classical Greek thinkers that spring to mind early on a Wednsday morning' is not exactly a random dataset. However, it does seem to indicate that during the first millenium BCE, if someone survived into their thirties and had a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, they had a reasonable chance of reaching 70.

Yes, it seems reasonable that ancient peoples could distinguish deaths from specific causes such as disease, conflict and famine from those due to what they might think of natural old age. So 70 is about right for that.

Just now, sethoflagos said:

There's significant well-documented evidence that Plato lived to at least 75. Aristotle deceased at 62. Pythagoras ~75. Socrates ~71. Aristophanes ~60. Thales of Miletus >=77. Archimedes ~75. Plutarch ~80. Epicurus ~71. Diogenes >=79. Zeno of Citium ~72. Zeno of Elea ~60. Zeno of Sidon ~75. Crates of Thebes ~80.

All three score years and ten give or take. There are exceptions: Eudoxus of Cnidus appears to have died at the tender age of 50; Pyrrho of Elis and Hippocrates of Kos appear to have both reached 90 years. And 'all the classical Greek thinkers that spring to mind early on a Wednsday morning' is not exactly a random dataset. However, it does seem to indicate that during the first millenium BCE, if someone survived into their thirties and had a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, they had a reasonable chance of reaching 70.

I'm not disputing any of this, but your mention of Archimedes reminds me that there are two other outstandings causes of death missing.

War

Slavery