Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
1–10 of 176 posts
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#2I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#3> On average, lead levels in children’s blood at the peak of the Roman empire could have risen 2.4 micrograms per decilitre, the researchers found, reducing their IQ by 2.5 to 3 points. When taking background lead into account, childhood blood levels may have reached about 3.5 micrograms per decilitre.
> A 2021 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US found blood levels in children aged one to five years fell from 15.2 to 0.83 micrograms per decilitre between the late 1970s and 2016 as leaded fuels were banned.
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#4I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic
Has plastic been linked to lower IQ?
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#5I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic
Perhaps not with respect to IQ but there’s a chance that future historians might correlate the use of plastics with increased rates of infertility.
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#6I suspect a similarly ugly reality is what happened in Cambodia after Pol Pot's genocide. It's done very poorly compared to its neighbors.
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#7I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic
It doesn't seem as if the principal researcher behind this result is a historian:
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#8I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#9I wonder if future historians will see a similar drop after widespread use of plastic
Maybe, but given that "plastics" are a broad category I'd expect that IQ would me a poor proxy for some of their effects.
BPA for instance, is a xenoestrogen. I'm not sure what metric to watch for it, but it's probably not IQ.
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#10Similarly, arsenical bronze (copper + arsenic) was common before tin started to be used, and I've often wondered how common arsenic poisoning was in the copper age / early bronze age.
When we think of the nastiness of industry, it's often industrial 19th century Britain and so on, but some of these villages (often quite remote) back then were full on industrial sites with massive smelting operations and the entire population including children engaged in mining and smithing and then exporting.