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  1. anlomedad @[email protected] ·

    @Global_Repercussions

    Intriguing!
    "cooler temperatures, higher altitudes and lower rainfall " – ah!
    This paper proposes the source for the 14th century #plague outbreak to be in Kyrgystan on a mountain ridge called Tian.
    nature.com/articles/s41586-022
    "The source of the #BlackDeath in fourteenth-century central Eurasia" #Spyrou et al 2022

    Actually, I am in the middle of a little climate-related project where epidemic or pandemic outbreak years and population declines in inner-continental Eurasia are important (so not in regions close to a coast). Not only plague, any epidemic with major population decline.

    Would you know from the top of your head a good source for this from 500 AD onwards?

    I would have thought especially China to have good statistics on times with population declines, given that their "art of administration" was handed down uninterrupted from generation to generation.
    As opposed to Europe with its topsy turvy and fragmented political /administrative history.

    But reading this paper suggests that such outbreaks are better documented in Europe, and Southern Europe especially, which is a region I am not interested in due to proximity to a coast.
    China dates are scarce. Why tho?
    "Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World" #Alfani et al 2017 cambridge.org/core/journals/jo

    #plague #blackdeath #spyrou #alfani
  2. anlomedad @[email protected] ·

    @rburghol

    Ja, maybe. I have started on it. But still far from seeing anything I could share.

    Reuters today writes about a BC plague epidemic in Scandinavia reuters.com/science/genome-evi
    But while those regions do have indeed 2 or 3 tree ring data series reaching that far back, the population was too small I reckon to leave a footprint in the forest, so to speak. And of course, its too close to the coast so the hydrological cycle is simply dominated by the Atlantic anyway.

    But I also found this economics history paper on pre-industrial plague and other epidemics in Eurasia, with actual onset and end years in a table, alongside the numbers of population decline in regions. Very helpful for the project.

    Before I found that one, I merely had OurWorldInData population data with a very coarse and frustrating time resolution.

    #Alfani et al 2017, "Plague and Lethal Epidemics
    in the Pre-Industrial World"

    cambridge.org/core/services/ao

    #alfani