Living in the context of civilization ourselves, we are inclined to view its development as a great step up on a so-called ladder of progress. Whatever benefits civilization has brought, the cultural changes it represents have produced new problems. Among them is the problem of waste disposal. In fact, waste disposal probably began to be a problem in settled, farming communities even before civilizations emerged. But as villages grew into towns and towns grew into cities, the problem became far more serious, as crowded conditions and the buildup of garbage and sewage created optimal environments for infectious diseases such as bubonic plague, typhoid, and cholera. Early cities therefore tended to be disease-ridden places, with relatively high death rates.
Genetically based adaptation to diseases may also have influenced the course of civilization. In northern Europeans, for example, the mutation of a gene on chromosome 7
Action theory The theory that self-serving actions by forceful leaders play a role in civilization’s emergence.
East of Naples, Italy, dumping of toxic waste and the sheer volume of normal garbage have become serious environmental threats. Organized crime syndicates provide illegal, less expensive ways to dispose of toxic waste, which has led to a contamination of the environment and the foods produced there. Dioxin, asbestos, and other toxins may have made their way into the food supply, including into water buffalo milk that is used to make the gourmet food buffalo mozzarella. In 2008, when the crime syndicate-run landfill reached capacity, garbage collectors went on strike leaving uncollected trash to pile up in the city.
Makes carriers resistant to cholera, typhoid, and other bacterial diarrheas.209 Because of the mortality caused by these diseases, selection favored spread of this allele among the population. But, as with sickle-cell anemia, protection comes at a price. That price is cystic fibrosis—a usually fatal disease present in people who are homozygous for the altered gene.
The rise of towns and cities brought with it other acute, infectious diseases. In a small population, diseases such as chicken pox, influenza, measles, mumps, pertussis, polio, rubella, and smallpox will kill or immunize so high a proportion of the population that the virus cannot continue to propagate. Measles, for example, is likely to die out in any human population with fewer than half a million people.210 Hence, such diseases, when introduced into small communities, spread immediately to the whole population and then die out. For these diseases to continue, they require a large population, such as is found in cities. Survivors possessed immunity to these deadly diseases.
The disease tuberculosis (TB) would not have become widespread without the development of cities. The bacteria that cause TB cannot survive in the presence of sunlight and fresh air. Before humans lived in dark, crowded urban centers, if an infected individual coughed and released the TB bacteria into the air, sunlight would prevent the spread of infection. Therefore, TB, like many other sicknesses, can be called a disease of civilization.
Social Stratification and Disease
Civilization affects disease in another powerful way. Social stratification is as much a determinant of disease as any bacterium, past and present. For example, Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe were forced into urban ghettos over several centuries, becoming especially vulnerable to the TB thriving in crowded, dark, confined neighborhoods. As we have seen with the genetic response to malaria (sickle cell and other abnormal hemoglobins) and bacterial diarrheas (the cystic fibrosis gene), TB triggered a genetic response in the form of the Tay-Sachs allele. Individuals heterozygous for the Tay-Sachs allele were protected from this disease.19
Unfortunately, homozygotes for the Tay-Sachs allele develop a lethal, degenerative condition that remains common in Ashkenazi Jews. Without the selective pressure of TB, the frequency of the Tay-Sachs allele would never have increased. Similarly, without the strict social
9 Ridley, p. 191.
Rules confining poor Jews to the ghettos (compounded by social and religious rules about marriage), the frequency of the Tay-Sachs allele would never have increased. In recent times, cultural mechanisms such as prenatal and premarital genetic testing have resulted in a decrease in the frequency of the Tay-Sachs allele.
Before the discovery of antibiotics in the early 20th century, individuals infected with the bacteria causing TB would invariably waste away and die. While antibiotics have reduced deaths from TB, resistant forms of the bacteria require an expensive regime of multiple drugs. Not only are poor individuals more likely to become infected with TB, they are also less likely to be able to afford expensive medicines required to treat this disease. For people in poor countries and for disadvantaged people in wealthier countries, TB—like AIDS—can be an incurable, fatal, infectious disease. As Holger Sawert from the World Health Organization has said, “Both TB and HIV thrive on poverty.”211 Before the social stratification accompanying the emergence of cities and states, as far as infectious microbes were concerned, all humans were the same.
Infectious disease played a major role in European colonization of the Americas. When Europeans with immunity to so-called Old World diseases came to the Americas for the first time, they brought these devastating diseases with them. Millions of Native Americans—who had never been exposed to influenza, smallpox, typhus, and measles—died as a result. The microbes causing these diseases and the human populations upon which they depend developed in tandem over thousands of years of urban life in Eurasia, and before that in village life with a variety of domesticated animal species. Thus anyone who survived acquired immunity in the process. See this chapter’s Biocultural Connection for more on the death and disease Europeans brought with them when they colonized the Americas.
Very few diseases traveled back to Europe from the Americas. Instead, these colonizers brought back riches that they had pillaged and papers that gave them ownership of lands they had claimed. One rare exception is that Charles Darwin seems to have returned from his famous journey on the H. M.S. Beagle with Chagas disease, a parasitic infection caused by a bug bite.212 Traditionally it was a disease of the rural poor, but today the large influx of poor farmers into urban centers in Mexico, Central America, and South America means that Chagas disease has become a problem in urban areas as well.
Anthropology and Cities of the Future
Not until relatively recent times did public health measures reduce the risk of living in cities, and had it not been for a constant influx of rural peoples, areas of high population density might not have persisted. Europe’s urban population, for example, did not become self-sustaining until early in the 20th century.213
What led people to live in such unhealthy places? Most likely, people were attracted by the same things that lure people to cities today: They are vibrant, exciting places that provide people with new opportunities and protection in times of warfare. Of course, people’s experience in the cities did not always live up to advance expectations, particularly for the poor.
In addition to health problems, many early cities faced social problems strikingly similar to those found in cities all over the world today. Dense population, inequalities of class systems, and oppressive centralized governments created internal stress. The poor saw that the wealthy had all the things that they themselves lacked. It was not just a question of luxury items; the poor did not have enough food or space in which to live with comfort, dignity, and health.
Evidence of warfare in early civilizations is common. Cities were fortified. Ancient documents list battles, raids, and wars between groups. Cylinder seals, paintings, and sculptures depict battle scenes, victorious kings, and captured prisoners of war. Increasing population and the accompanying scarcity of fertile farming land often led to boundary disputes and quarrels over land between civilized states or between so-called tribal peoples and a state. When war broke out, people crowded into walled cities for protection and for access to irrigation systems.
What we would call development today—the transformation of rural open spaces into densely populated and built-up environments—posed similar problems in the past. At the Maya city of Copan, in the present-day country of Honduras, much of the fertile bottom lands along the Copan River were paved over as the city grew, making the people more and more dependent on food grown in the fragile soils of the valley slopes. This ultimately led to catastrophic soil loss through erosion and a breakdown of food production. Similarly, in ancient Mesopotamia, evaporation of water from extensive irrigation works resulted in a buildup of salt in the soil, ruining it for agricultural use.
22 Diamond, p. 203.
Biocultural Connection
Perilous Pigs: The Introduction of Swine-Borne Disease
To the Americas by Charles C. Mann
On May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay, in Florida. . . . Half warrior, half venture capitalist, Soto had grown very rich very young by becoming a market leader in the nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had helped to fund Pizarro's seizure of the Incan empire, which had made Soto wealthier still. Looking quite literally for new worlds to conquer, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to let him loose in North America. . . . He came to Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs.
From today's perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that would justify Soto's actions. For four years his force, looking for gold, wandered through what is now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas, wrecking almost everything it touched. The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they had never before encountered an army with horses and guns. . . . Soto's men managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing the Spaniards did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—bring the pigs.
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia, . . . Soto crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. . . . [T]he Spaniards were watched by several thousand Indian warriors. Utterly without fear,
Soto brushed past the Indian force into what is now eastern Arkansas, through thickly settled land—"very well peopled with large towns,” one of his men later recalled. . . . Eventually the Spaniards approached a cluster of small cities, each protected by earthen walls, sizeable moats, and deadeye archers. In his usual fashion, Soto brazenly marched in, stole food, and marched out.
After Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in i6B2 whites appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. . . . area[s] where Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. . . [were] deserted [without an] Indian village for 200 miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an anthropologist at the University of New
Mexico. . . . Soto "had a privileged glimpse” of an Indian world, Hudson says. "The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?”
The question is even more complex than it may seem. Disaster of this magnitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto's army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto's force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife in the surrounding forest. When human beings and domesticated animals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation spawns new diseases: Avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. . . . [W]hat scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest.
Indeed, the calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. . . . [After] Soto's. . . visit, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about
200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. . . . "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies— was wiped out.”
How could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? . . . One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside.
In Indian New England, Neal Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, wrote. . . [that] family and friends gathered with the shaman at the sufferer's bedside to wait out the illness—a practice that "could only have served to spread the disease more rapidly.”
To Elizabeth Fenn, the smallpox historian, the squabble over numbers obscures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, . . . the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams—entire ways of life hissed away like steam. . . . In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. "You have to wonder,” Fenn says. "What were all those people up to in all that time?”
BIOCULTURAL QUESTION
Does the history of the decimation of American Indians through infectious disease have any parallels in the contemporary globalized world? Do infectious diseases impact all peoples equally?
Adapted from Mann, C. C. (2005).
1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf.
It is discouraging to note that many of the problems associated with the first civilizations are still with us. Waste disposal, pollution-related health problems, crowding, social inequities, and warfare continue to be serious problems. Through the study of past civilizations and through comparison of contemporary societies, we now stand a chance of understanding such problems. Such understanding represents a central part of the anthropologist’s mission and can contribute to the ability of our species to transcend human-made problems.
1. In large-scale societies of the past and present, people face the challenge of social stratification. Elite classes have disproportionate access to and control of all resources. Is social stratification an inevitable consequence of the emergence of cities and states? How can the study of social stratification in the past contribute to the resolution of contemporary issues of social justice?
2. In previous chapters it was emphasized that human evolutionary history should not be thought of as progress. Why is it similarly incorrect to think of the shift from village to city to state as progress?
3. What are some of the ways that differences in social stratification are expressed in your community? Does your community have any traditions surrounding death that serve to restate the social differentiation of individuals?
4. With today’s global communication and economic networks, will it be possible to shift away from social systems involving centralized governments, or will a centralized authority have to control and protect resources for the entire world?
5. With many archaeological discoveries there is a value placed on “firsts,” such as the earliest writing, the first city, or the earliest government. Given the history of the independent emergence of cities and states throughout the world, do you think that scientists should place more value on some of these events just because they are older?
Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel. New York: Norton.
Also recommended in Chapter 10, this book has an excellent discussion of the relation among diseases, social complexity, and social change.
Fagan, B. (2001). The seventy great mysteries of the ancient world. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Archaeologist Brian Fagan edited contributions from twenty-eight other archaeologists and historians about some of the great controversies in the field in this readable book.
Mann, C. C. (2005). 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf.
Also recommended in Chapter 10, this book demonstrates the devastation European colonizers brought to the Americas.
Marcus, J., & Flannery, K. V. (1996). Zapotec civilization: How urban society evolved in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley. New York: Thames & Hudson.
With its lavish illustrations, this looks like a coffee table book, but it is a thoughtful and serious work on the rise of a pristine civilization and a presentation of the authors’ action theory.
McNeill W. (1992). Plagues and people. New York: Anchor. This book offers an interpretation of world history through the impact of infectious disease. It documents the role disease played in the colonization of the Americas as well as continuing the investigation into the present with a social history of AIDS.
Sabloff, J. A. (1997). The cities of ancient Mexico (rev. ed.). New York: Thames & Hudson.
This well-written and lavishly illustrated book describes the major cities of the Olmecs, Zapotecs, Maya, Teotihuacans, Toltecs, and Aztecs. Following the descriptions, Sabloff discusses the question of origins, the problems of archaeological reconstruction, and the basis on which he provides vignettes of life in the ancient cities. The book concludes with a gazetteer of fifty sites in Mesoamerica.
Challenge Issue The people of the United States of America took a significant step toward redressing a history of slavery and racism with the election of Barack Hussein Obama as their forty-fourth president in 2008. This moment of extraordinary social and political significance challenges us to look at race and racism both in the past and in the present. It challenges us to recognize our common origins and to avoid oversimplification, discrimination, bigotry, and even bloodshed fueled by superficial differences. It requires us to recognize that racism feeds on folk beliefs that so-called racial groups are natural and separate divisions within our species based on visible physical differences. Biological evidence demonstrates that separate races do not exist. Broadly defined, geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another in only 7 percent of their genes. Having exchanged genes throughout evolutionary history, human populations continue to do so today. Instead of leading to the development of distinctive subspecies (biologically defined races), this genetic exchange has maintained all of humankind as a single species. Although race functions as a social and political category that promotes inequality in some societies, it is a cultural construct without an objective scientific basis.
© Xinhua/Photoshot
World History
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