Ice sample on the melter during continuous ice core chemical analyses at the Desert Research Institute (Credit: Sylvain Masclin)
Topics: Chemistry, Civilization, Democracy, Environment, Existentialism
It’s perhaps historically appropriate that the word “ironic” contains “iron.” Mining and smelting minerals like iron represented technological highs at the Roman Empire’s peak. But those activities also produced enough lead pollution to impair its citizens’ IQs, according to a new study in PNAS.
“Detailed ice core records of Arctic lead pollution, together with sophisticated atmospheric modeling and modern epidemiology, indicate that human industrial activities were measurably damaging human health more than 2,000 years ago,” says Joe McConnell, a scientist at the Desert Research Institute and lead author of the study.
Scholars have debated lead poisoning’s impact on Roman history for decades. Some have even argued that lead poisoning played a role in the downfall of the Roman empire. Most of those arguments have focused on ancient writings and archeology that provide hints about lead’s impact — circumstantial evidence, if you will.
Now a team of researchers has provided hard evidence linking pollution and ancient intellect. They identified the level of pollutants in three ice cores that dated between 500 B.C.E. through 600 C.E. — the era spanning the rise of the Roman Republic through the fall of the Roman Empire. Then they compared those levels with how lead pollution affected the general public during its peak in the 1970s, before it was banned from gasoline.
According to the study, the lead in the air in Roman times affected IQs by about a third as much as in the late 1970s, when the U.S. Clean Air Act went into effect, and about twice as much as in the early 2010s.
“Elites and non-elites in cities and rural areas alike were affected by the background air pollution — no one could escape the health effects," says McConnell.
Ancient Lead Poisoning May Have Contributed to the Roman Empire’s Downfall, Paul Smaglik, Discover Magazine
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