| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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Archaeological journalist David Keys' book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization and his theory that in 535 A.D. a world altering event occurred which largely determined the course of civilization was the subject of an episode in the PBS series Secrets of the Dead, one of my guilty pleasures. Using evidence from ice cores, tree rings and carbon dating he develops a theory that a massive volcanic explosion caused years of failed crops and disease that brought down major civilizations all over the world and allowed societies better adapted to those conditions to thrive...and replace those of antiquity.
Perhaps it is so. Perhaps the dark ages really were dark for a time due to a world girdling cloud of volcanic ashes and vapors which drastically cooled the world. The resulting crop failures and increase of diseases such as bubonic plague might explain the fall of civilizations from Constantinople to pre-Columbian America.
The recorded history of the final fall of Rome in its Eastern capital of Constantinople includes a great plague soon followed by decades of incursions by Mongolian horsemen, the Avars, which sapped the empire of wealth paid as bribes to avert attack. The Avars had been dominant in Mongolia, hundreds of miles north of China, but by the mid sixth century had been driven from the area by the Turks, a mountain people long dominated by the Avars. The Avars fled west toward Constantinople and warmer climes where their superior horsemanship gave them an edge over the weakened Romans.
What allowed the Turks to rise up against the Avars and force them west and so bring down the remnants of Rome? Keys speculates that it was that same volcanic winter that devastated Constantinople. What interests me about this was the differential experiences of the Turks and the Avars which Keys explains was a consequence of their economic and cultural practices. The Avars were horsemen. They didn't just ride horses, they milked them and ate them too. Horses were the foundation of their economy as well as their military. The Turks were cattlemen.
Cattle, as well as all other ruminants such as goats and sheep, have marvelous digestive systems that allow them to efficiently extract nutrients from forage, even rank forage grown in stressful conditions. Horses have less efficient metabolisms that require more and better forage to sustain them. In the bad years of volcanic winter the Turks suffered much less than the Avars and roles reversed due to economic rather than military reasons. The Avars were starving because their horses were starving. They had no choice but to migrate to warmer climes for better forage.
Ruminant based civilizations thrived all over the world. The efficient digestive systems of ruminants allow them to thrive where less efficient species - from rats to humans - struggle to survive. Ruminants can digest materials that are otherwise food for no species above bacteria, a trick they manage by harboring bacteria in their eponymous rumens. Ruminants live off the metabolic byproducts of those bacteria and the carcasses of dead bacteria. All animals do this to some extent but ruminants are specialists with multi-chambered digestive systems that work much better. It makes sense that ancient societies from Judaic tribes to American plains tribes had a spiritual relationship with ruminants.
There are interesting implications for present times. Nearly a sixth of humanity is food insecure, agricultural lands all over the world have been degraded by cropping to produce the rich foods needed by humans and domestic animals with inefficient metabolisms, and domestic ruminants are often fattened with grains and rich foods that bypass their rumens and defeat their evolutionary adaptations to coarse forage. Over half of the grain produced in the US is used for animal fodder. The rain forests of Brazil are being converted to cropland to grow soybeans for export to European livestock. More sensible agronomic practices that took advantage of ruminant abilities would reduce environmental damage from cropping while providing a net increase in human foods.