I don't know if you have heard about Clair Cameron Patterson, but he was one of the most courageous people ever.
During the 60's he fought against the petroleum industry and against the mainstream science.
Luckily to all of us - he succeeded and tetraethyllead was banned.
He certainly deserves a separate post, but today we will talk about the earliest known Pb pollution.
No, this is not a story about the Roman lead pipes.
It predates the Romans as much as Romans predate us.
About 7000 years BCE, metallurgy started to spread from Anatolia (Turkey) to the Balkans, with rich deposits of Banatitic Magmatic and Metallogenic Belt that stretches across Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria:
The methodology:
The column of the peat soil was sampled from the Red Creek Bog on the Tara Mountain in Serbia.
The chronology was calibrated using 14C dating which could sound a bit problematic because it's a bit too old for this method, but the peat sedimentation in bogs is not very exciting process and extrapolation could be easily done with a couple of centuries up or down.
The amount of lead was determined by ICP, probably the best possible solution in this case.
Results:
The Ancient Balkan people started to pollute the planet produce various metals and boost the prosperity of Europe some 3600 years BCE (+-100), reached the peak about a century later and declined some 3000 years BCE.
Sorry, but I can't copy-paste the Figure due to the non-commercial CC, but feel free to open the link I provided in the References.
Samples from the other parts of Europe show the signs of pollution during the Roman period.
There are some very interesting "side discoveries".
Pb concentrations perfectly match the plagues and wars/ conquests
There was the Antonine plague when the production dropped.
Plague of Cyprian, sharp drop again.
And than... The Slavs came and - nothing happened at all. I guess we were the kindest imaginable invaders ever (if we ever invaded the Balkans)
There were 4 more plagues, 4 more drops.
And the invasion of the Turks followed by the drop in production.
References:
- Ersek, V., Longman, J., Veres, D., & Finsinger, W. (2018). Exceptionally high levels of lead pollution in the Balkans from the Early Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. link
It is close to impossible to start a new industry without indirectly creating more pollution. This has always been the case so far.
But this is just something temporary, I think with time we will figure out ways to keep innovating in all sort of ways, without increasing pollution.
Of course and let's not forget about the first serbian city of Atlantis.
Odlican tekst.
And of course, Serbian ancient dino-pets :)
*for non-serbians: there is a strong pseudo-scientific move in all Balkan countries that "proves" that all known civilization originates from Balkan nations. The most extreme among them are connecting the ancient Vincha Culture with today's nations.
The second question is the origin of Slavs. Written records originate from the VI century and suddenly, entire Eastern Europe is Slavic. What happened before - well there are at least 5 good ideas about it, without the complete consensus in scientific community.
This is the reason why I pointed out that nothing dramatical was observed in the production of metals during the period of Slavic arrival. Have they arrived at all?
Your type of writting is good and great info about history and etc
Have a good dayGreat article @alexs1320
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