How We Survived: What History Has To Say About Disaster
Lyndon Johnson meets with Presidential candidate Richard Nixon at the White House, July 26, 1968. (Image courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)
Things feel dark today, but a look back at history will push you to take heart and carry on.
Around 75,000 years ago, a massive volcano erupted. It happened near what is now Lake Toba in western Indonesia. Modern scientists have hardly settled on the story, but there are at least a few things they agree upon.
For one, it was a tremendous explosion. The total mass erupted from the volcano was 100 times greater than what came from the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption, which itself preceded the “Year Without Summer”.
The Toba eruption produced an ash layer that blanketed the South Asia with about six inches of material. Evidence suggests that the effects of this ash were felt as far afield as the Arabian Sea to the west, and the South China Sea to the north.
At roughly the same time, the human species experienced a genetic bottleneck. Studies indicate that, somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, our genetic diversity (and, perhaps, the population as well) dropped precipitously. Anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 humans survived this event. For reference’s sake, an August 2016 estimate put modern population numbers at 7.4 billion.
A few researchers have pinned the Toba eruption and its massive ash clouds as the culprit. The ash, they say, could have gotten into the atmosphere and changed the global climate, causing sunlight to dim and temperatures to plummet. Previously abundant food sources would have become scarce. The surviving humans would have had to adapt.
Of course, this is a highly controversial theory. Given the time scale and the limits of current scientific tools, there is only so much information that archaeologists can coax out of the ground.
Perhaps the bottleneck was the result of something else. There may have been another environmental disaster. Human populations may have been subject to such migration that genetic diversity stalled.
Regardless, early homo sapiens faced seemingly insurmountable odds. How could this creature, whose only unique adaptation was a ridiculously oversized brain, possibly survive?
Yet, here we are.
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The Triumph of Death, Pieter Breugel, c.1562. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
"In the year of the Lord 1348 there was a very great pestilence in the city and district of Florence…. Whether because these illnesses were previously unknown or because physicians had not previously studied them, there seemed to be no cure. There was such a fear that no one seemed to know what to do. Florentine Chronicle of Marchionne di Coppo Stefani"
In the 14th century, the Black Death ravaged Europe. At the time, it seemed as if it were the end of the world, the very apocalypse warned of by priests and, for those who could read, the Bible itself. Everywhere, it seemed, people grew sick and died within a matter of days. Entire families and towns were left nearly empty. Graveyards, meanwhile, were filled to capacity with the dead.
For those who survived, it must have seemed like a cruel miracle. They were alive and whole while their communities were in shambles. Homes lay empty. Livestock wandered untended. Society and local economies were upended. What guilt must the survivors have felt? What possibility, hopeful or not, lay before them?
The plague did not retreat, not entirely. It would return to Europe in the 17th century, with much of the same terrible force. Those first plague survivors were then gone for nearly three hundred years. Their descendants faced the same sickness – likely bubonic plague – with a similar apocalyptic fear.
"I went on a walk to Greenwich, on my way seeing a coffin with a dead body in it, dead of plague. It lay in an open yard . . . It was carried there last night, and the parish has not told anybody to bury it. This disease makes us more cruel to one another than we are to dogs. Diary of Samuel Pepys, August 22, 1665"
But, they survived, too. Samuel Pepys kept his diary from 1660 to 1669, later dying as an old man in 1703. Other plagues would follow – influenza, smallpox, ebola, and so – and still, we are here.