Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, by Kyle Harper

Abstract

This is a prodigious historical synthesis. Reaching back before the birth of Homo sapiens, it glides through pre-history to documentary history as late as our present struggles with COVID-19 and further pathogenic forces on the horizon. This history has not taken the usual path of concentrating on epidemics; rather, it integrates numerous endemic diseases with epidemics and spends more space on endemic killers, which have weighed more heavily on human populations, from hunters and gatherers to the present, than the more studied pandemics. I know of no wide-ranging historical work to have so meticulously integrated the epidemic with the endemic. To examine the long story of how humans acquired their ‘distinctive disease pool’, Kyle Harper focuses his book on four ‘transformative energy revolutions’. The first is fire and begins well before Homo sapiens’ rise with australopithecines in Africa around four million years ago. The second is the Neolithic Revolution of farming, c.10,000 years ago. The third begins with Christopher Columbus and ‘regular crossing of the Atlantic Ocean’ (p. 8), and the fourth concerns the harnessing of fossil fuels that extracted ‘eons of congealed sunlight’ from coal, oil and gas. One timely strand is Harper’s charting of new evidence on the interactions between humans and their parasites derived from the work of geneticists, bioarchaeologists, physical anthropologists and other scholars over the past three decades. These scientific endeavours have created two new archives: ancient DNA of pathogens, and phylogenetic trees constructed from genome sequencing of present-day humans, animals and plants.