Maybe it’s a consequence of focusing on the weight of the world’s problems so much lately, but this episode title made me legit laugh 😂
The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was diagnosed in October 1977, and the last case of rinderpest was diagnosed in 2001.
Source: https://www.thefactsite.com/top-100-random-funny-facts/
Wikipedia linked to this extremely interesting article: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/pearce00.pdf
I'm wondering how the community of experts views this. To summarize: rinderpest was a cattle disease, and it hit Africa in the late 1800s and decimated (literally) cattle populations throughout the continent. Cattle, as livestock, were a vital component of the ecosystem, because they kept the growth of scrub and bush under control. Without them, grassland turned to shrubland, which was an ideal habitat for tsetse flies, which attacked any cows or humans who tried to "reclaim" the land, spreading sleeping sickness to both cows and humans. Instead, wild animals returned to these lands.
All of this happened around the same time as the Berlin conference and the scramble for Africa. So European colonists found a continent of people with their primary food source removed, who were plagued by sleeping sickness, and with large swaths of land that were "wild" and seemed to be completely unused. The major modern parks of Africa are relics of this time, since they reflect a snapshot of a sudden, temporary historical aberration.
I'm still chewing over the ramifications of this idea; is the land being restored now that rinderpest was eliminated from wildebeest? Are the great parks in Africa, though noble ecological projects, actually detrimental to people by acting as massive tsetse fly reservoirs? How is the history of European interaction with Africans different before and after this plague?
But I'd like to make sure this isn't some fringe view that has been considered and dismissed by most historians, because of some evidence or ideas that the author did not present.
VVantedforbreathing talks about being an "illegal" immigrant, hairygirl discusses hirsutism, and jgrahamc talks about "Plan 28", the project to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.
CowboyPerfect has an issue with Wal-Mart's labels.
shares images from the Russian lunar program, andrewinmelbourne posts on the elimination of Rinderpest, SteadyEddie starts a discussion on why the sky is blue, and Antares42 posts on how newspapers lie.
