{"id":19422,"date":"2025-01-06T19:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T20:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19422"},"modified":"2025-01-06T20:23:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T20:23:39","slug":"lead-poisoning-may-have-made-ancient-romans-a-bit-less-intelligent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19422","title":{"rendered":"Lead Poisoning May Have Made Ancient Romans a Bit Less Intelligent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Exposure to lead from mining probably lowered I.Q. levels in the empire, research has found. It might be the world\u2019s first case of widespread industrial pollution.<\/p>\n

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Roughly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. But something sinister was in the air. Literally.<\/p>\n

Widespread pollution in the form of airborne lead was taking a toll on health and intelligence, researchers reported on Monday<\/a> in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n

During the roughly two centuries starting in 27 B.C., a period of relative stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana, the empire extended throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its economy relied on silver coinage, which required huge mining operations.<\/p>\n

But extracting silver from the Earth creates a whole lot of lead, said Joseph McConnell, an environmental scientist at the Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit group based in Nevada, and the lead author of the new research. \u201cIf you produce an ounce of silver, you\u2019d have produced something like 10,000 ounces of lead.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And lead has a host of negative effects on the human body. \u201cThere is no such thing as any safe level of lead exposure,\u201d said Deborah Cory-Slechta, a neurotoxicologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who was not involved in the research.<\/p>\n

Dr. McConnell and his colleagues have now detected lead in layers of ice collected in Russia and Greenland that date to the time of the Roman Empire. Lead entered the atmosphere from Roman mining operations, hitched a ride on air currents and eventually fell out of the atmosphere as snow in the Arctic, the team surmised.<\/p>\n

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Exposure to lead from mining probably lowered I.Q. levels in the empire, research has found. It might be the world\u2019s first case of widespread industrial pollution.Roughly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. But something sinister was in the air. Literally.Widespread pollution in the form of airborne lead was taking a toll on health and intelligence, researchers reported on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.During the roughly two centuries starting in 27 B.C., a period of relative stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana, the empire extended throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its economy relied on silver coinage, which required huge mining operations.But extracting silver from the Earth creates a whole lot of lead, said Joseph McConnell, an environmental scientist at the Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit group based in Nevada, and the lead author of the new research. \u201cIf you produce an ounce of silver, you\u2019d have produced something like 10,000 ounces of lead.\u201dAnd lead has a host of negative effects on the human body. \u201cThere is no such thing as any safe level of lead exposure,\u201d said Deborah Cory-Slechta, a neurotoxicologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who was not involved in the research.Dr. McConnell and his colleagues have now detected lead in layers of ice collected in Russia and Greenland that date to the time of the Roman Empire. Lead entered the atmosphere from Roman mining operations, hitched a ride on air currents and eventually fell out of the atmosphere as snow in the Arctic, the team surmised.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19424,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19425,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19422\/revisions\/19425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}