☠️ What was the first epidemic in history? This video walks the first four, in order: the burned house at Hamin Mangha in northeast China about 5,000 years ago with 97 bodies inside, and the ancient plague DNA found in Stone Age teeth across Eurasia from the same window; the Plague of Athens in 430 BC, the first epidemic ever described by an eyewitness, which we still can't identify; the Antonine Plague of 165 AD, the first to cross an entire empire on Roman roads, probably smallpox; and the Plague of Justinian in 541 AD, the first pandemic confirmed by DNA as bubonic plague. Plus why epidemics couldn't exist before farming, and why the first germ is still infecting people today.
📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES:
▸ Yawei Zhou et al. — "The Hamin Mangha Site: Mass Deaths and Abandonment of a Late Neolithic Settlement in Northeastern China" (2022, Asian Perspectives) https://doi.org/10.1353/asi.2022.0010
▸ Nicolás Rascovan et al. — "Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline" (2019, Cell) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.005
▸ Lake Baikal hunter-gatherer plague outbreaks ~5,500 years ago (2026, Nature) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10540-5
▸ Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.47–54 (the Plague of Athens), translated by Rex Warner (Penguin Classics)
▸ Robert Littman — "The Plague of Athens: Epidemiology and Paleopathology" (2009, Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine) https://doi.org/10.1002/msj.20137
▸ R.J. Littman & M.L. Littman — "Galen and the Antonine Plague" (1973, American Journal of Philology); Kyle Harper — "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" (2017, Princeton University Press)
▸ Procopius — History of the Wars, Book 2.22–23 (the Plague of Justinian)
▸ Marcel Keller et al. — "Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes from across Western Europe reveal early diversification during the First Pandemic (541–750)" (2019, PNAS) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820447116
▸ Lee Mordechai et al. — "The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?" (2019, PNAS) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903797116 — the debate over death tolls
▸ World Health Organization — Plague fact sheet (current cases worldwide): https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/plague
⚠️ This video is for educational and entertainment purposes. Death tolls for ancient epidemics are estimates and heavily debated, and the video says so.
👇 Tell me in the comments: which of the four would you have survived?
#history #epidemic #pandemic #plague #ancienthistory #rome #athens #archaeology #education #animation
