The causal relationship here is murky. If have a hard time believing that a change in Italian shipping in 1345 was the only thing that allowed the bubonic plague to enter the otherwise hermetically sealed Europe.<p>The reason for the plague was disastrous health and cleanliness standards.
This is the sort of headline you get when academic research must function as click bait.<p>There are very few <i>X caused Y</i> statements one can make about historical events in good faith or with good cause.
Results reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment [1] submitted to HN [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02964-0" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02964-0</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151324">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151324</a>
Long ago when the History Channel was still about History, they did a hypothetical “What if the 10 plagues of Egypt actually happened?” That was surprisingly plausible. I’m getting some vibes of that.<p>The punchline of that hypothetical was that the hail and the locusts lead to wet grain being pulled into storehouses. A fungus that locusts can carry that is poisonous mouldered in the storehouses. The cultural tradition of giving the firstborn son a double helping may have reached fatal levels of exposure to the toxin, killing enough children to become a myth.
While most folks have probably heard of "the" Renaissance:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance</a><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance</a><p>it was not the first in history:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...</a><p>There's a certain 'critical mass' of people and thinkers, as well as decent enough communications (roads, letters) to allow for collaboration, needed to achieve a flowering/growth of knowledge, and that was cut off by (amongst other things) the Black Death:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages</a>
Alphonse X "The Wise". A Castillian king basically sanctioned a book on board games, from chess to a few less known ones with dice. Enough said. There's tons of difference between the 6th century and the 12th.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos</a><p>This would blow out lots of Anglo-Saxon minds with a very bad depiction of Middle Ages compared to the modern era from Newton. But, IRL, it was all about a <i>gradual</i> modernization of thinking.<p>People didn't just became <i>modern</i> with the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution. It happened tons of stuff in between.
So the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011 could've caused covid?