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Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
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Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#12Similarly, 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 po…
Re arsenic poisoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestus#:~:text=In%20the%20....
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#13I 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.
Perhaps there is a link between plastics and ADHD [1].
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#14I 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.
Anogenital distance is likely the preferred measure.
> Males with a short AGD (lower than the median around 52 mm (2 in)) have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD.
> Swan et al. report that the levels of phthalates associated with significant AGD reductions are found in approximately one-quarter of Americans tested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for phthalate body burdens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anogenital_distance (warning on the header photos).
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#15I have no idea if this is true (and honestly can only barely remember the reference, which I read maybe a decade or two ago), but I believe I saw a comment that the interior of lead pipes eventually develop a "calcified" (don't know what else to call it) lining of the lead reacting to water, such that lead stops leeching into the water that passes through the pipes.
I believe this came up when reading something about how the trend of traditional historicity has always been to identify the Big Major Cause of the fall of the Roman empire, but that each explanation ultimately falls short. The followup point made by this, of course, is two-fold: that "falls" are often very complex and multi-faceted; and that the Roman empire never really "fell" in the Gibbons sense - it just slowly evolved, and eventually shifted east, finally becoming self-consciously retro-classically Hellenized, and just morphed to something new and lasted another thousand years -- but never actually fell during that time.
Anyone else have any thoughts or insight on the "lead pipes eventually line themselves with something non-lead-like" angle?
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#16Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#17I have no idea if this is true (and honestly can only barely remember the reference, which I read maybe a decade or two ago), but I believe I saw a comment that the interior of lead pipes eventually develop a "calcified" (don't know what else to call it) lining of the lead reacting to water, such that lead stops leeching into the water that passes through the pipes. I believe this came up when reading something about…
It's called mineralization, and happens so long as there are dissolved minerals in the water and PH is correct. Lead contamination happened in Flint, MI because additives to control the water PH were neglected to save cost, and slightly acidic water ate away at the mineralization layer in the pipes and began dissolving the lead again.
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#18> 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 t…
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Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#19I find it hard to believe that atmospheric lead levels were higher in the ancient Roman Empire than since the Industrial Revolution. The amount of lead mined and smelted now is vastly more than it was then. Regardless of current safety measures, there were decades with none. And then we had leaded gasoline for a century.
Everything in this article may be accurate, but that likely means we're all far worse off now.
Re: Roman Empire's use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
#20Similarly, 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 po…
A repair guy taught me recently that up until the 40s cadmium was used as a layer on some metallic devices, then people realized it was toxic. Funny.