THE BLACK DEATH AND OTHER HISTORICAL PANDEMICS
INTRODUCTION: EPIDEMICS AND PANDEMICS IN HISTORY
Epidemics have accompanied us since our origin as a species, causing us terrible damage in the form of suffering and death. Of these, a few have become pandemics, affecting most of the human population on several continents. The virulence of the infectious agent, in most cases specific types of viruses and bacteria, was such that despite the limitations of past communication routes it wiped out a considerable percentage of the Earth’s inhabitants.
Of all those that we know of, at least in historical times, there has been no other like the black plague of the 14th century. Some, like the so-called Spanish flu of 1918-1919, produced a greater number of deaths. But the proportion of victims reached by the plague in the late Middle Ages, in relation to the total population of Europe, Asia and Africa, the affected continents, is unprecedented for its extraordinary impact. There were areas where more than 90% of the people died, and in general terms it is now established that at least one out of every three, even half of the human beings that populated our planet, were exterminated by an extremely aggressive pathogen.
Are we sure it was the worst pandemic ever? In historical times, yes, but we can’t have security about what happened in prehistoric times. We know, especially from genetic studies and other multidisciplinary research, that about 70,000 years ago there was what has been called the Toba bottleneck. It was the most critical moment for Homo sapiens, for anatomically modern humans, because in a very short time the planet went from about 100,000 individuals to no more than 2,000 to 10,000.
The most widespread hypothesis is that it was the result of the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded. A super volcano occurred in Lake Toba, Indonesia, whose explosion was 100 times greater than that of Mount Tambora in 1815, the most intense known in recent history and responsible for the so-called summerless year of 1816. Geologists, volcanologists and anthropologists postulated that such a megaeruption could have caused, due to the enormous mass of materials deposited in the atmosphere, a sixyear global volcanic winter, an event that would have led to the near extinction of our species. However, studies in recent years that have analyzed the deposits in Lake Malawi have shown that this catastrophe did not significantly alter the climate of East Africa, where the largest population of Homo sapiens was then concentrated.
A recent study [1] has concluded that rainfall was reduced and partly affected Afromontane vegetation, but far from the conditions of what would be a volcanic winter. If there is no paleoclimatic data to support this, then what was it that caused this genetic bottleneck 70,000 years ago? Could it have been a disease, a violent epidemic caused by a pathogen that nearly wiped us out?
Advances in the field of genetics may determine, in the near future, whether the human population was really reduced to such a small number of individuals at that time, for which there is still no consensus. However, various biologists and palaeontologists believe that there have been species that have become extinct due to an etiological agent, a virus or lethal bacteria. This could have been the case with Homo neanderthalensis. A complex study that analyzed its sudden decline some 35,000 years ago, until its disappearance, ruled out that the causes could be food shortages, climatic effects, famine or pressure from modern humans, as most research had advocated [2]. Instead, the possibility of a disease that would kill
