Black Death by Seal .
Andre Willers
5 Dec 2014
Synopsis :
Pneumonic plague , like TB , was spread by seals . Hence the
rapid spread by waterways , and ineffectiveness of quarantines .
Discussion :
1.TB spread by Seal .
Repeated in Appendix A below .
2. TB is spread by aerosol . So is pneumonic plague .
3.Putative transmission human to seal or dolphin .
Humans in quarantine on board ships with the pneumonic form
swim and breathe bubbles .
Seals and dolphins swim through the bubbles .
It only takes a few viri to make it through .
TB , according to hard evidence , did . See Appendix A .
4. How long to cross the Atlantic ?
https://www.dolphins.org/sea_lion_info : at 6 mph , about 20 days .
https://www.dolphins.org/sea_lion_info : at 6 mph , about 20 days .
5.Which diseases are will cross ?
5.1 TB proven . Long term infectiousness .
This could have been transmitted by cetaceans across the
atlantic , then spread further by riverine
humans and seals or otters .
5.3 Ebola .
Ebola seems to have at least four vectors :
Riverine mammals (otters , rats) , Bats , Plants , Humans .
Hopefully , not birds .
Notice in map below that the countries affected all have
sea-borders or river connections .
Haemorrhagic fevers are usually called after the nearest
river . Nominative determinism , or unconscious connection ?
6.Bush meat .
The correlation usually made is that these genetic
crossovers are caused by insufficient protein from fishing , leading to
increased consumption of bush meat .
7. This has it backward , in usual human fashion .
Humans are obligate omega-3 consumers .
They have to get some extra omega-3 fatty acids . So they
eat more sea-bushmeat like seals , otters , dolphins . All susceptible to Ebola
.
This is the primary vector .
8. Warning :
This means that Ebola outbreaks can be expected on the
Florida , Mexican , South American coasts . These would have been spread by
dolphins or seals .
Remember , this has happened before with TB .
As expected, See http://www.itg.be/internet/ebola/ebola-50.htm
for South American hemorrhagic fevers .
9.Black Death Spread by rivers and ocean faster than a horse .
Note the river and canal routes .
10 . The cure was worse than the disease .
Sigh . Quarantine of ships just massively increased the
probability of pneumonic infection from humans to marine mammals , who then
rapidly spread it .
11.This must have happened repeatedly in history to give all
the hemorrhagic fevers in the America’s .
I would insist on a good biohazard suit before investigating
a well-preserved North-American mammal circa 11000 YearsAgo
12.Why ?
It seems that humans did not kill them . Something else did
. See Appendix B
The end of the Ice Age did .
But not in the usual fashion .
As the ice melted , streams formed . They combined to form
path to the sea .
The reverse is also true .
The sea could come to the herds in the hinterlands , long
isolated .
Any mammalian disease , not just hemorrhagic fevers would
spread in a virgin field .
The same thing repeated in the Arctic areas .
And is happening now .
Shit . Ebola in the Arctic circle is a distinct possibility
. As well as something like 1918 Flu .
13. The Biggest and fastest killer : Flu .
A pneumonic viral disease .
Nearly did for the humans in 1918 .
“A cough at 08h00 and a coffin at 14h00”. This actually happened .
Reminding of mastodons “dropping dead” and then freezing . This actually happened to
humans .
Well the dropping dead part .
“In August 1918, a more virulent strain
appeared simultaneously in Brest, France, in Freetown, Sierra
Leone, and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts.”
Note the ocean/river connection .
14. Predictions :
14.1 Major Ebola and other tropical diseases appearing on
the Eastern coasts of North , Middle and South America . Just look at the map .
14.2 At least two major Flu epidemics (1918 scale) will wipe
out major mammals remaining on the Arctic . So get them into zoos now .
Why ? Gaia balancing books .
14.3 Unexpected
desertification of previously temperate regions .
Why ?
Gaia operates to keep 1/3 of the land surface of the planet desert , as an open mine for trace elements
for the rest . Simple , elegant and proven .
Global warming causes massive rain on previous deserts (like
California now Dec 2014) . Gaia
compensates by creating new deserts .
Which happens to be somebody’s prized farmland .
Dessert is nicer .
Andre .
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Appendix A
Seals
brought TB to Americas
Bacteria
found in ancient Peru remains points to relatively recent origin of the disease
and to its spread by sea.
20 August 2014
Article tools
Sara Marsteller
Infection from marine mammals could explain how tuberculosis
spread to people living in Peru at a time when the Americas were already
geographically isolated.
Ancient
bacterial genome sequences collected from human remains in Peru suggest that
seals first gave tuberculosis (TB) to humans in the Americas.
Modern
TB strains found in North and South America are closely related to strains from
Europe, suggesting that the Spaniards introduced the disease to the New World
when they colonized South America in the sixteenth century.
Beginning
in the 1950s, however, palaeoanthropological studies found evidence of lesions
associated with TB in pre-Columbian skeletons in South America. This suggested
that a member of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, the
group of related bacterial species responsible for the disease, was present on
the continent before European contact.
In
a study published today in Nature1,
a team led by palaeogeneticist Johannes Krause at the University of Tübingen in
Germany provides DNA evidence for this theory. The researchers present three
1,000-year-old M. tuberculosis genomes extracted from human
skeletons found in Peru.
“We
wanted to reconstruct the genome of those ancient M. tuberculosis to
obtain a sort of molecular fossil,” explains Krause. “Pathogens don’t leave fossils,
but they do leave their DNA in the skeleton, teeth and bones of the victims of
the disease.” Having sequenced the three genomes, the researchers set out to
understand how these ancient TB strains were related to modern ones.
Calibrated clock
Related stories
The
general opinion in recent years has been that TB emerged about 70,000 years
ago, and that modern humans first acquired it before leaving Africa2.
These dates were worked out by measuring how much all known strains of TB
bacteria differ from each other, and then using the rate at which genetic
differences accumulate — a 'molecular clock' — to work out how much time was
needed for all that diversity to evolve.
Krause
and his colleagues did their own molecular-clock calculation, basing the rate
of TB evolution on the differences between modern strains and the
1,000-year-old Peruvian ones. Their results suggest that the most recent common
ancestor (MRCA) of all strains of M. tuberculosis evolved less
than 6,000 years ago.
“This
is a landmark paper that challenges our previous ideas about the origins of
tuberculosis, not just in the Americas but in the Old World too,” says Terry
Brown, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Manchester, UK. The
date is so recent that it “suggests that previous estimates for the MRCA were
wildly incorrect”, he says. However, he adds, more Mycobacterium genome
sequences, and from different time periods, will be needed to confirm this
result.
Mystery journey
If
these findings are correct and M. tuberculosis is less than
6,000 years old, they pose another conundrum. The microbe must have reached the
Americas before Europeans arrived, but after the land bridge between North
America and Asia disappeared around 11,000 years ago, Krause notes. “How did it
get to America, say, from Asia, if there was no longer a land bridge?”
In
the search for answers, the researchers decided to look at the genetics of 40
different strains of tuberculosis that infect animals. They found that the
ancient strains from Peru were not like human-adapted forms, but were very
similar to forms called Mycobacterium pinnipedii, which are adapted
to seals and sea lions.
Mycobacterium
pinnipedii has been transmitted from seals to
humans in zoos. Brown notes that in the past archaeologists have speculated
that this might have been a source of TB infection in coastal areas of South
America, where seals were hunted.
Tom
Gilbert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen, says that
the seal-transfer idea is certainly attractive, but he is cautious about the
paper’s conclusion. “What’s more likely — that marine mammals gave rise to
tuberculosis in humans in South America, or that we simply haven’t sampled
enough relevant terrestrial hosts on the continent to spot the true ancestor?”
Krause
agrees that because this ancient strain does not exist in people today, we
cannot say for sure that it was adapted to its new host, meaning that it became
transmissible from human to human. “To nail this hypothesis we would have to
find tuberculosis in North America and in inland populations in South America.”
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15748
1.
Bos, K. I. et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13591 (2014).
o PubMed
2.
Comas, I. et al. Nature
Genet. 45, 1176–1182 (2013).
From nature.com
12 February 2014
09 January 2014
21 May 2013
26 October 2011
25 October 2011
27 April 2011
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Appendix B
Humans Are Off the
Hook for the Mastodon Extinction
Written by
CONTRIBUTOR
December 1, 2014 // 03:54 PM EST
North America once hosted a spectacular diversity of megafauna,
including giant sloths, giant condors, and giant beavers (can you spot the
theme?). But perhaps the most iconic species of the Pleistocene continent was
the American mastodon, an elephant-like animal weighing about five tons, which suddenly
went extinct about 11,000 years ago. But what drove this species, which was
otherwise incredibly successful, to drop off face of the planet?
A paper published today in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences sheds new light on this ongoing
paleontological mystery, and suggests that humans, at least, are off the hook
for the mastodon’s extinction.
“There was a provocative idea that came out back in the 1960s,
called overkill, suggesting that the first people that came to North America
across the Bering Land Bridge went on this rampaging killing spree,” lead author
Grant Zazula, a paleontologist at the Yukon Palaeontology Program, told me over
the phone.
“When people first entered North America at the end of the Ice
Age, it was a small population, pretty sparse groups of people,” he continued.
“To think of them just mowing everything down in front of them using spears is
not a very satisfactory explanation.”
Comparison of mastodon (left) and a mammoth. Image: George/press
release.
Zazula and his colleagues, including American Museum of Natural
History curator and paleontologist Ross MacPhee, were able to rule out humans
by revisiting and updating the timeline of the mastodon’s migration south from
the Arctic.
They used two different methods of radiocarbon dating on 36
fossilized mastodon teeth, and discovered that the specimens were much older
than originally estimated.
“In a nutshell, what we found that there isn’t really a basis
for thinking that mastodons lived anywhere further north than say, the Great
Lakes, except when conditions were especially warm like they were in the last
interglaciation [about 125,000 years ago],” MacPhee told me over the phone.
The results suggest that mastodons were long gone by the time
the last full glacial period was in swing 75,000 years ago, contrary to
previous research. Humans didn’t make their way to North America until around
14,000 years ago, which means they could not have sparked the mastodon’s mass
exodus to the south.
That’s not to say that humans didn’t contribute to the animal’s
extinction, or to the decrease in megafauna more generally. But the species was
already in deep trouble long before humans were on the scene—a finding that’s
backed up by genetic analysis.
“You can use genetic diversity as a proxy for population
diversity,” explained Zazula. “It’s been done with a number of Ice Age species,
and what’s actually provocative about a lot of the data is that their
populations are in steady decline leading up to the final extinction. These are
populations that are going downhill anyway, and something happened at the end
of the Ice Age that pushed them over the edge.”
“What’s causing that overall decline in diversity has to be
something other than humans because for the most part, humans weren’t around,”
he added.
Zazula cutting samples of American mastodon bones for
radiocarbon dating. Image: Grant Zazula
So if humans didn’t kill off the mastodons, then what did?
That’s the million dollar question. “There really isn’t a good answer, and
that’s what makes the question interesting still,” said Zazula, “because the
answer isn’t really clear and there’s still lots to be learned.”
Climate change definitely played a role by limiting the animal’s
range, but that doesn’t explain the extremely sudden drop-off 11,000 years ago.
“We know that these mammals went through numerous periods of rapid climate
change in the past and our evidence shows that they were always able to pull
through,” said Zazula. “So what makes the Ice Age so different that they just
weren’t able to pull through?”
Some scientists have speculated that an extraterrestrial
impact—from either an asteroid or a comet—was behind the swift disappearance of
megafauna, but Zazula says the evidence for that is dodgy. Meanwhile, MacPhee
has theorized that a pandemic may have raged through the mastodon population,
effectively wiping them from the face of the Earth.
“Infectious diseases, particularly ones for which the species in
question have no innate capacity to deal with—no genetically based
immunity—could have caused essentially an instantaneous drop in population
size, which is really what you need to do to provoke an extinction,” he told
me. There is not a lot of evidence to back that up at the moment, but the last
decade has produced major advances in detecting pathogens in fossils, so the
theory may yet bear fruit.
For the moment, however, the death of the mastodon remains one
of paleontology’s most alluring unsolved mysteries. “We’re really missing
something,” said Zazula. “Something just doesn’t make sense. It really defies
all explanation right now.”
But regardless of the reasons behind their beleaguered end,
MacPhee thinks the species are entitled to more respect for what they did with
their time on the planet.
“Mastodons never get good press and I never understood why,” he
told me. “They were very successful not only in the old world but also in the
new world. They got over most of the habitable part of the world at one time or
another.”
Point taken. While it’s great to hear that humans weren’t
responsible for edging out a species for once, the team’s paper is also a
welcome opportunity to reflect on how truly awesome mastodons were—in the
original sense of the adjective.
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