The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(82)
Chris gave a short speech, talking about how important it was to preserve the site and the surrounding rainforest and warning about the grave threat of the encroaching clear-cutting. “For the first time,” he told the audience, “we are able to study this culture systematically.”
President Hernández then gave a brief but moving speech, and his words took on an almost religious feeling. “God has blessed us to be alive in this moment so special in the history of Honduras,” he said, adding that everyone assembled there had “great expectations of what this will mean for Honduras and the world.” The discovery of T1, he said, was important beyond the benefit to archaeology. He outlined a vision of what it meant to Hondurans: Not only would it encourage tourism and help train a new generation of Honduran archaeologists; it also spoke to the very identity of the country and its people. Later he would build a special room in the presidential palace to display some of the artifacts.
Honduras is a spectacularly interesting country, whose people have a bifurcating history that goes back to both the Old World and the New. While the Spanish history of Honduras is well known, its pre-Columbian history (beyond Copán) is still an enigma. People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future. That is why the legend of the White City runs so deep in the Honduran national psyche: It’s a direct connection to a pre-Columbian past that was rich, complex, and worthy of remembrance. Five hundred years ago, the survivors of the catastrophe at T1 who walked out the city did not just disappear. Most of them lived on, and their descendants are still part of the vibrant mestizo culture of Honduras today.
Hernández closed out his speech with one final, dramatic proclamation. The city in T1 would henceforth be given a real name: La Ciudad del Jaguar, the City of the Jaguar.
CHAPTER 27
We became orphans, oh my sons!
When humans first walked into the Americas over the Bering Land Bridge fifteen to twenty thousand years ago,* our species existed everywhere as small, wandering bands of hunter-gatherers. There were no cities, no towns, no farming or animal husbandry. We were spread out and moving all the time, only rarely encountering other groups. The low population densities prevented most potential diseases from gaining a foothold. People suffered from parasites and infections, but they did not get most of the diseases so familiar in recent human history—measles, chicken pox, colds, the flu, smallpox, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and bubonic plague, to name only a few.
In the last ten thousand years, as human population densities increased, disease moved into center stage of human affairs. Pandemics changed the very arc of human history. Despite our dazzling technology, we are still very much at the mercy of pathogens, old and new.
In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in only one direction?* The answer lies in how the lives of Old World and New World people diverged after that cross-continental migration more than fifteen thousand years ago.
Farming, which allowed people to settle into towns and villages, was independently invented in both the Old World and the New. The key difference was in animal husbandry. In the Old World, a great variety of animals were domesticated, starting with cattle about eight to ten thousand years ago and quickly moving on to pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, and sheep. New World farmers domesticated animals as well, notably llamas, guinea pigs, dogs, and turkeys. But in Europe (and Asia and Africa), the raising and breeding of livestock became a central aspect of life, an essential activity in almost every household. For thousands of years, Europeans lived in close quarters with their livestock and were continuously exposed to their microbes and diseases. In the New World, perhaps because they had more space and fewer domesticated animals, people did not live cheek by fowl with their animals.
Humans do not usually catch infectious diseases from animals; pathogens tend to confine their nasty work to a single species or genus. (Leishmaniasis is a striking exception.) But microbes mutate all the time. Once in a while, an animal pathogen will change in such a way that it suddenly infects a person. When people in the Near East first domesticated cattle from a type of wild ox called an aurochs, a mutation in the cowpox virus allowed it to jump into humans—and smallpox was born. Rinderpest in cattle migrated to people and became measles. Tuberculosis probably originated in cattle, influenza in birds and pigs, whooping cough in pigs or dogs, and malaria in chickens and ducks. The same process goes on today: Ebola probably jumped to humans from bats, while HIV crashed into our species from monkeys and chimpanzees.
Alongside the domestication of animals, humans in the Old World began settling down in villages, towns, and cities. People lived together in much denser numbers than before. Cities, with their bustle, trade, filth, and close quarters, created a marvelous home for pathogens and an ideal staging ground for epidemics. So when diseases migrated from livestock to people, epidemics broke out. Those diseases found plenty of human fuel, racing from town to town and country to country and even crossing the oceans on board ships. Biologists call these “crowd diseases” because that’s exactly what they need to propagate and evolve.
Epidemics periodically swept through European settlements, killing the susceptible and sparing the robust, culling the gene pool. As always, children were the majority of the victims. Almost no disease is 100 percent fatal: Some victims always survive. The survivors tended to have genes that helped them resist the disease a little better, and they passed that resistance on to their children. Over thousands of years and countless deaths, people in the Old World gradually built up a genetic resistance to many brutal epidemic diseases.