> Roman Empire’s use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
I'm not a fan of this phrasing. None of the findings had anything to do with measuring IQ levels in ancient Europe. They were about measuring historical levels of lead, which they then just plugged into modern models to presume some levels of cognitive effects.
A study that was actually able to measure cognitive disparities and correlate them with measured levels of lead would have been extremely interesting, but this is not that. Everything other than the measurements of historical lead levels seems to be fluff.
This would kind of be like saying "massive asteroid strike 100m years ago lead to cataclysmic tsunami, study finds" but then not showing any evidence of a tsunami, just evidence that it struck an ocean and the inference that that would have caused a tsunami. It might be a reasonable inference, it's just not as interesting as the title would make it seem.
Edit: I should qualify, I'm not trying to say that "they did the math"-style papers don't have value, just that the phrasing in how they are presented matters to me. If the phrasing was more like "Use of lead in Roman Empire would have lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds" I would have no issue with it.
Could also happen that all the advances in hygiene and infrastructure and logistics during the Roman empire had a more positive impact on IQ than the negative effect of lead. Not starving while growing up does wonders for the brain.
Plenty of people starved...just not (in their better centuries) the better-off Romans.
For (presumed) IQ benefits, I'd focus more on the hygiene, and the relatively disease-free drinking water which all those lead pipes & lead-lined aqueducts provided. (Plus the sewers.) There were lots of nasty diseases you could catch by drinking the water in ancient cities. And at scale, "lead lowered IQ" isn't much different to "unable to think well while ill", to "higher mortality makes education a poorer investment".
That a very reductive view. Data shows that during the Roman empire, people moved on mass from hill forts into the flatlands (presumably giving better acess to agroculture, trade and water). We also see far more material culture, and not just for rich people. Huge amount of just common consumer goods, and this even streches far beyond the borders of the empire itself. Population also increased during this time.
Yes, many places part of the empire for 100s, sometimes even 1000 years.
And conquest is of course always bad. But that wasn't the point you were making.
You were talking as if there was constant large scale starvation in Rome, and there for the most part wasn't. You point that only rich Roman elites didn't regularly starve isn't really true. And its certainty not true in comparison to other places in the ancient world.
Fully agree, @peeters - as I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, there's a long-standing trend of trying to identify the one true cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. Each explanation falls short - it's just a complicated thing (and heck, the empire didn't really fall, it just shifted east.)
Something a lot of people don't realise is that the last of the "Roman" states (that called themselves Roman) didn't cease until about 50 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic (xref the fall of Constantinople).
Oh it's really easy to extrapolate stuff. But perhaps they shouldn't. A lot of papers I've seen recently have wild romantic extrapolations based on cherry picked correlations.
Some of the social sciences are terrible at this. A former partner was a researcher in one of what I now consider to be less respectable fields and she would come up with a feely conclusion and fit the data to it and publish it. Wanted me to co-author one with her and do the statistical analysis. Told her I don't want to be on Retraction Watch.
That could explain how the lead poisoning crowd took over.
No, there won't be any retractions, you will be "educated" that you are stupid, "anti science", and too stupid to understand the newly discovered "fact".
1. Lactose Tolerance: The ability to digest lactose as adults evolved in populations with a history of dairy farming, such as those in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
2. Disease Resistance: Genetic adaptations to diseases like malaria (e.g., sickle cell trait) have become more common in certain regions.
3. Skin Pigmentation: Variations in skin color have continued to adapt to UV exposure in different regions, influenced by migration and interbreeding.
4. Height and Physique: Improved nutrition and health care have led to an increase in average height and changes in body composition in many populations.
5. Wisdom Teeth: A gradual decrease in jaw size has made wisdom teeth less functional, and they are increasingly absent in some populations.
6. Brain Function: While the brain's size and structure remain unchanged, shifts in cognitive demands and education have influenced how we use our brains.
And none of that is at all relevant to how lead affects the human brain and so is completely useless. You should have asked it "Would lead lower IQ in humans 2000 years ago the same way it does today?" This is what DeepSeekv3 says:
Yes, lead exposure would have likely had similar detrimental effects on human cognition and IQ 2000 years ago as it does today. Lead is a neurotoxin that interferes with the development and function of the brain, particularly in children. Its harmful effects on intelligence, behavior, and overall health are well-documented in modern studies, and these effects would have been the same in the past, even if they were not understood at the time.
> 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.
Wow. We mock those stupid Romans for putting lead in their drinking water supply, but we literally vaporized it and had everyone inhale it for decades so it'd go straight to the bloodstream.
Some of the smaller airports in the Bay Area (HWD, RHV, SQL) have UL94 but not all (PAO, HAF, and the large ones SJC, SFO, OAK don't). Fuel from a petrol station off field doesn't do you a lot of good, and it really doesn't help if you're refueling en route.
> we literally vaporized it and had everyone inhale it for decades
this is a massive scandal that has not been fully understood in public AFAIK. Extensive documentation of the false premise of leaded gasoline has been published, e.g.
2.5-3 micrograms per deciliter is nothing. Wouldn’t even come up as elevated by current childhood screening guidelines. I very much doubt 2-3 IQ point difference.
Isn't IQ a comparative representation of one's standing within their contemporary age group?
My understanding is that within a given group the median should be 100. So you won't see it change between groups. This is highly relevant when you're talking about different groups being exposed to different concentrations of lead.
As an extreme example to make the point, if people born in 1970 were all exposed to high concentrations of lead and were all morons as a result, their median IQ is still 100.
Then people born in 2000 are exposed to far less lead and are super smart, but their median IQ would still be 100.
Points above or below 100 are merely a specification of how many fractions of a standard deviation above or below that median within the given age group a person's performance is measured to be.
That said, even within a group, 2.5 - 3 points seems largely insignificant as an individual's score might vary more than this depending on which day of the week they took the test. It seems a big stretch to draw any scientific conclusion from such a small variance.
You're right about how IQ is measured with 100 being the average and, generally, 15 points being a standard deviation. But numerous tests also record raw scores and these can be compared between generations. Scandiland and other places with compulsory conscription + IQ testing are the goldmine here. This is what led to the observation of the 'Flynn Effect' - the observation that IQ between generations was increasing, and later to its apparent reversal that generally started sometime around 1990 in the developed world. [1] That paper reports a later date, because it's about America in which studies on this topic lagged substantially behind Europe.
It's not easily explained by things like immigration since it is also present (though less pronounced) even within families. The hypothesis I find most compelling is that IQ levels have "naturally" been declining for decades, but improvements in nutrition, education, etc were helping to offset, and even rise beyond, these declines. But as nutrition, education, etc reach the point of diminishing returns, the declines dominate.
> The hypothesis I find most compelling is that IQ levels have "naturally" been declining for decades
You find compelling the idea that organisms naturally get dumber with each successive generation? What possible mechanism would cause IQ levels to "naturally" decline? Have they been naturally declining since the dawn of civilization? Since LUCA? Shouldn't the expectation be that without other causes, IQ levels would remain roughly constant throughout generations?
I think there are two distinct branches of reasons. The first is probably what you're asking about - what environmental factor(s) could be lowering IQ. And I think there are countless possibilities there, but many are quite subjective or at least unproven. The trendy one in academic circles is air pollution as a cause (seems uncompelling to me, unless China suddenly sees a dramatic decline in urban IQ). I'd also add endless entertainment, urbanization/industrialization creating low trust societies, labor swapping from widely skilled self employment to narrowly skilled employment, chemicals/microplastics/etc that we consume in food/water, and so on.
But there's also the most objective and straightforward reason as well - evolution. As far as evolution is concerned IQ isn't good or bad, it's just another highly heritable trait. When it correlates against fertility (as it currently does), IQs will decrease over time. When it correlates with fertility (as it likely did when life was more difficult), they will increase over time.
The problem with IQ is that it measures the cerebellum. People who lack abstract thinking will learn to rely on the patterns and statistics, and intuitively score high on the tests.
The second problem is that people who don't have abstract thinking don't comprehend abstract thinking, and so they think that people with abstract thinking are dumb.
The explanation is that IQ measures the cerebellum, and the declining nutrition and increasing brain damage forces people to rely more on the cerebellum, the statistical engine, instead of abstract thinking.
Hmmm, I could imagine microplastics, PFAS, artificial dies, excessive and unhealthy amounts of sugar would all have a deleterious effect on IQ. Perhaps even specifically pre frontal cortex, etc.
Though that goes against Europe hitting the decline earlier than the US which leads in sugars and unhealthy foods.
There is nothing wrong with sugar, people can't burn it, because the body needs lead to break it into pyruvate. Then you need arsenic to input that into the krebs cycle. The mitochondria need a wide assortment of metals (likely at least copper, arsenic, selenium, mercury, cadmium and possibly chromium) when you don't get those, your mitochondia begin to fail, and the tissues where they do turn into "fat tissue".
I suspect they don't do the research for real, they do some kind of simulation, and write it was in mice. They do know the metal changes the protein, but they incorrectly claim that the version without it works, but in reality the one with it does. They could'n make such an error if they actually did the research for real.
You're basically right about the relative nature of IQ scores, but you're wrong about the comparison being drawn.
To impute the effect of lead, you look at a bunch of people, measure the amount of lead in their blood, measure their IQs, and see how much of a difference there is between people with a lot of lead and people with less or none.
Modern poor people who live in crummy areas where there's still a little bit of lead are about as stupid, relative to the leadless elite, as poor people from decades past who lived in crummy areas which, at the time, had a lot more lead than they do now.
It seems like a safe assumption that the effect of lead on people with negligible lead levels has stayed constant over the decades at indistinguishable-from-zero.
But for lead to explain the gap between the lead-haves and the lead-have-nots, its effect must have increased dramatically over that same period. That gap hasn't changed. But lead levels have plummeted.
There are confounders between houses with lead and other demographics and contribute to the gap and aren't completely controlled — aspects of social class and low mobility that are hard to explicitly capture, it's all old housing.
So as the lead level drops and the gap remains steady (increasingly dominated by the confounding factors), more and more IQ gap gets attributed to the small lead-level gap between those living in old housing with abated lead pipes + paint and new pipes + new paint.
It's a bit of a thing with a particular political persuasion in the US right now (RFK Jr has made his anti-fluoride position a big part of his deal for his future role as Secretary of Health and Human Services), and there was a report in the news recently that some see as backing up the claims against fluoride:
It's not as conclusive a study as some people might claim, though:
> For starters, 52 of the 74 studies were judged by the report authors to have a “high risk of bias.” That undermines the validity and reliability of their results.
> Another issue is that most of the studies considered fluoride exposures far above the target level for the U.S. ... Only seven of the studies assessed children whose water contained less than 1.5 mg/L of fluoride. When they were considered on their own, there was no relationship between fluoride exposure and IQ.
nothing to do with RFK or politics, I feel like people are missing the point here though, imagine Rome in 45 BC “why call out lead?” while Roberto F Kenedius has been spreading conspiracies about lead pipes being bad
Does your point have nothing to do with RFK, or is the point people are missing that RFK has been spreading conspiracy theories that might be real after all? I'm somewhat confused by the seeming contradiction.
nothing to do with RFK I was just piggybacking on the other comment mentioning him to further paint the original picture: history repeating itself, future culture trying to understand past culture by limited speculation, and future culture (being the present culture) that will eventually be the past culture and every present culture tends to think they understand things better than they actually do, so it’s fun to think of us talking about Rome and lead in water, and future culture talking about us and Fluoride in water, regardless of how accurate any of it is or related to “empire collapse”, funny to imagine there was someone back then saying claims about lead being possibly harmful are biased, whatever the personal motive was (ie, not wanting to believe they let their kids drink dangerous lead pipe water so they go out of their way to tell others that claims of lead being suspected to be dangerous are biased, which is itself a bias)
> You could have simply answered that both fluoride and lead seem to lower IQ so using either as an additive would be questionable.
This would have inaccurately reflected my understanding of the science: the link between fluoride and IQ is far more tenuous than lead at this point. See the study in the link above.
> That seems dismissive as hell, especially since the US is the odd man out here by choosing to medicate their water supply.
It's not intended to be dismissive, it's the primary reason why someone would have fluoride and IQ on their mind at the moment.
If someone thinks they can figure out 1500 years from now if the 'fall of the west' was because of fluoride, it's probably easier to look at the countries in the west that do and don't use it now.
I 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?
I haven't read it, but the book History of Toxicology and Environmental Health [0] would say that pipes were not a problem. Preparing food and wine in lead containers could have been a problem, but it wasn't until centuries after the Roman Empire "fell" that doctors even described the symptoms of lead poisoning.
And to throw in another quote from a scholarly source, "Water from the river Anio, which fed two of Rome's principal aqueducts, the Aqua Anio Vetus and Aqua Anio Novus, was particularly hard and conveyed high levels of dissolved calcium carbonate. Indeed, Frontinus complains in his treatise on the aqueducts of Rome, that "the accumulation of deposit, which sometimes hardens into a crust, contracts the channel of the water" (CXXII.1)." [1]
I hope I can be forgiven for replying to myself, but at this timestamp, I've got three excellent replies affirming the "lead pipes get gunked up and it stops being a notable problem" concept.
Thanks for the replies! Great stuff from all of you.
You obviously would prefer non-lead pipes, but running the water for a period before using flushes out any lead if the pipes are in the house. Like you say in your comment, it's when water sits in a container like a wine vat where leeching has time to accumulate.
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.
I don't know if I would call Flint's water just "slightly" acidic. It was acidic enough for the Flint hospital to complain about their stainless steel sinks rusting, for local automotive plants to dig their own wells because it was destroying parts they were washing, and turned their entire water supply system into swiss cheese that had to be replaced. It might be slightly acidic compared to highly concentrated acids, but in terms of potable water it seems extremely corrosive.
Of course you are right, and no offense meant. I grew up in Flint, and have family there to this day. My intention was more to communicate that even small changes in water PH can affect this mineralization layer.
What I rarely see talked about with regard to Flint's water supply is that Detroit was willing to give them water for free, which is documented, and the only explanation that makes sense as to why they weren't taken up on the offer is the state governor's cabinet connections to fracking and a pipeline intended to bring lakewater inland to facilitate fracking. They wanted the taxpayers of Flint to help foot the bill. See: http://banmichiganfracking.org/the-flint-water-connection-to...
Very interesting. I recently found out the house I grew up in in the UK over 15+ years had lead pipes that were never replaced, and I always wondered why they were not replaced and if it had some cognitive impact. This lining effect likely explains the reason, and offers at least some reassurance.
I have some late-19th-century books on plumbing that mention the same passivation layer, and so clearly it was known, along with some of the toxic effects of lead, back when it was widely used for plumbing (which I must also mention that the 'plumb' comes from 'plumbum' - Latin for lead.)
Also when talking about downfall. I think it is also sensible question timeframe when these materials were first used. Was that during raise of empire or after it? As it feels wrong that something that had been used for generations during formation of empire would lead to downfall...
There must be something, as I grew in a house with lead pipes, and while I will not disclose my IQ or that of my siblings, they are high. Or maybe we were lucky? Of course only anecdotical data.
I can't help but be pedantic and point out that since IQ is normalized, their average IQ would be 100 whether or not they used lead.
More philosophically, the condition of life is inherently susceptible to damage, so you practically have to draw the line at what level of damage you want to try and mitigate given the realities of the time. Do you want to be wrapped up, only breathing, eating, and drinking perfectly calibrated mixes of chemicals?
> 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.
So if my generation had lead levels 3-4 X higher than Roman kids, does this explain the “Exams are getting easier” meme - that exams are staying the same, but kids really are getting smarter …
( also the hey exams were waaay harder in the Edwardian Era meme?)
I 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.
> By some estimates, the Roman empire amounted to more than 80 million people at its peak, meaning that about a quarter of the world’s population could have been exposed to the lead pollution generated by mining and smelting. The effects of lead poisoning can be so severe that scholars have debated whether it contributed to the fall of the empire.
I wonder what will happen to current empires from micro- and nano-plastics, PFAS, airpolution, as well as harmful yet popular habits like doomscrolling and games addictions.
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.
I was imagining something a bit more impactful (and easy to find in the data), because as far as that one goes, it's not clear why anyone should know or care.
Maybe high school graduation rate (an inverse proxy to indicate bullying)?
I find it interesting that the article you linked didn't mention the heritability of ADHD. In around 3/4ths[0] of cases ADHD is caused by genetics, which leaves plenty of space for other causes.
Oh gosh... "insidious castration of all men" and "blurred gender roles". Really? They have been blurry for all of homo sapiens existence, just think of the matriarchal societies that still exist today[0]. Gender dysphoria has been documented from individuals[1] for a long time, societies accepted a third gender since ancient time and even in the USA, the Cercle Hermaphroditos[2] was quite early to the party, being founded in 1895 (yes 130 years ago).
I'm confident that plastic will go the way trees did: Unbothered for a long time until bacteria figured dead wood is just another food and put a stop to trees being fossilized as coal.
Stop plastics, it's a good idea to do so for many reasons, but there's no need to drag gender roles and those stupid good old times into it. I much prefer spending time with my kid instead of slaving away 9-5 six days a week.
Roman lead pipes were not a significant factor on the health of humans back then... To the same extent as public sewers, bathing, hygiene rules etc. Rome had it a lot better than even some countries today. Yeah you still had to deal with infections and such which could have been deadly but time and medicine era that you were in you had way better health outcomes in Rome
Fluoride has two major differences that would complicate such a study: First, fluoride is a natural component of lots of drinking water (often at levels far higher than artificial fluoridation creates), while lead contamination in drinking water is rare and usually human-caused. Second, lead is known to be bad for one's health in any amount, while fluoride is only known to cause IQ drops above a certain dose.
> This systematic review and meta-analysis found inverse associations and a dose-response association between fluoride measurements in urine and drinking water and children’s IQ across the large multicountry epidemiological literature. There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.
Headline writers were the original click baiters - understandable to get opens but really harms the substance of the article, which is that increase in lead poisoning may have had debilitating impact on the Roman Empire.
Interestingly this paper probably underestimates things since it is not evaluating food sources, such as lead sweetened wine commonly drunk by the elites. I suspect the effects were non trivial.
Similarly, 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.
- "...We took hundreds of soil samples from both sites for chemical analyses, creating high-resolution maps of heavy metal presence in the region. We found that pollution levels at the Timna copper mining sites are extremely low and confined to the locations of the ancient smelting furnaces. [...] The new study contradicts a series of papers published since the 1990s about pollution caused allegedly by the ancient copper industry."
I don't know much about Britain's historical usage of bronze alloys, but I would be surprised if Britain used all that much arsenic bronze at all because Cornwall has some of of the largest and oldest tin mines in the world. But of course mining and metal processing in general has tons of nasty things besides just arsenic.
Lead contamination is still fairly widespread: carrots, sweet potatoes, chocolate, spices. It’s a good idea to get your blood tested and try to find any sources of exposure if your levels are high.
As a child born in 1970 that loved the smell of gasoline, I really wish I could test how many IQ points I lost. I tell my kids it must be at least 15, because they are much smarter than me!
There is no evidence whatsoever that lead was widely known to be toxic, until a group of conspirationists took over the academia.
In fact such a belief couldn't have been widespread. The historical quotes appear to be fabricated.
In fact it's essential. Roman sewers and sanitation quickly flushed it down the drain, by 235 it was in chaos, long distance trade was no longer possible and a thousand years long dark age ensued. The original depletion happened deep in prehistory, the most major event happening around 26kya. Also by ice cores, substantiated by geological changes and mammoth skeletons.
I mean, if your goal is to get from point A to point B, having a fast car just means you go there faster.
I'm thinking of IQ in a similar way, as in - high IQ = faster car. But at the end of the day, it's still the same, isn't it? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Even worse: if you have an IQ of 100, there are lots of things you just can't do.
And if you have an IQ of 120? Still lots of things you just can't do.
Same with 140. And it doesn't even stop there.
There are two different form of understandability that comes to my mind,
1. Things that you don't understand because you don't have the necessary background knowledge,
2. And the things you'd fundamentally never understand because of the limitations of your own mind, which is, limited by the IQ.
I' assuming you're trying to mean the second version here.
Unfortunately for that we have computers so we don't need high IQ to do more work like calculations but higher quality work (which also depends on what kind of work you're doing) and that is oftentimes not primarily related to high IQ (think of creative work)
I think you're right. (Did some ChatGPTing, and found this one holds).
But still, I don't believe IQ alone can improve your reasoning capability, could it? Like with proper education, and knowledge, a person with average IQ would more likely be able to see the correct patterns, and connections between ideas, than a high IQ person without the required education would.
It's like - having the proper education, trumps the meaning of having a high IQ. But, it's true, given the similar environment, I'd assume, the high IQ person would do better.
Reading through the submission, it looks like hardly anyone replied or upvoted, the replies seemed like constructive criticism, you acknowledged that you used AI, and you used "we" throughout replies to the feedback. Even in the absence of the article for context, what you are saying now doesn't seem like a fair assessment on behalf of the community, at least from the comment section's side. I will acknowledge there are lowlife trolls who lurk HN, but also flagging an article that is largely created by AI seems reasonable.
> Roman Empire’s use of lead lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds
I'm not a fan of this phrasing. None of the findings had anything to do with measuring IQ levels in ancient Europe. They were about measuring historical levels of lead, which they then just plugged into modern models to presume some levels of cognitive effects.
A study that was actually able to measure cognitive disparities and correlate them with measured levels of lead would have been extremely interesting, but this is not that. Everything other than the measurements of historical lead levels seems to be fluff.
This would kind of be like saying "massive asteroid strike 100m years ago lead to cataclysmic tsunami, study finds" but then not showing any evidence of a tsunami, just evidence that it struck an ocean and the inference that that would have caused a tsunami. It might be a reasonable inference, it's just not as interesting as the title would make it seem.
Edit: I should qualify, I'm not trying to say that "they did the math"-style papers don't have value, just that the phrasing in how they are presented matters to me. If the phrasing was more like "Use of lead in Roman Empire would have lowered IQ levels across Europe, study finds" I would have no issue with it.
Could also happen that all the advances in hygiene and infrastructure and logistics during the Roman empire had a more positive impact on IQ than the negative effect of lead. Not starving while growing up does wonders for the brain.
What did the Romans ever do for us?
I dont know who "us" is, but probably roads and writing?
Well obviously the roads, the roads go without saying, don't they?
I think reference is in order... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
Ohhh, haha thanks, now it makes sense who "us" is ;)
Those aren't roman inventions…
Roman-built roads and the spread of Latin were tremendously important. Noone said they were invented by them.
I mean, I guess the aqueduct was a nice thing?!
Probably not in the parts of Europe outside the Roman Empire and definitely not in the peoples that the Romans killed all of.
Plenty of people starved...just not (in their better centuries) the better-off Romans.
For (presumed) IQ benefits, I'd focus more on the hygiene, and the relatively disease-free drinking water which all those lead pipes & lead-lined aqueducts provided. (Plus the sewers.) There were lots of nasty diseases you could catch by drinking the water in ancient cities. And at scale, "lead lowered IQ" isn't much different to "unable to think well while ill", to "higher mortality makes education a poorer investment".
That a very reductive view. Data shows that during the Roman empire, people moved on mass from hill forts into the flatlands (presumably giving better acess to agroculture, trade and water). We also see far more material culture, and not just for rich people. Huge amount of just common consumer goods, and this even streches far beyond the borders of the empire itself. Population also increased during this time.
> Population also increased during this time
you mean after the slaughters?
Yes, many places part of the empire for 100s, sometimes even 1000 years.
And conquest is of course always bad. But that wasn't the point you were making.
You were talking as if there was constant large scale starvation in Rome, and there for the most part wasn't. You point that only rich Roman elites didn't regularly starve isn't really true. And its certainty not true in comparison to other places in the ancient world.
Fully agree, @peeters - as I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, there's a long-standing trend of trying to identify the one true cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. Each explanation falls short - it's just a complicated thing (and heck, the empire didn't really fall, it just shifted east.)
Or as some wag once put it, the empire then continued to decline and fall for another 1000 years.
Inclined to agree with this. It didn't fall, just sort of withered into other cultural ideologies and empires.
Some of it was also fucking bananas which didn't survive enlightenment.
Something a lot of people don't realise is that the last of the "Roman" states (that called themselves Roman) didn't cease until about 50 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic (xref the fall of Constantinople).
You can also count the Holy Roman Empire that was dissolved in 1806.
This is one of the problems with modern academia. It's hard to extrapolate these things
The guardian article is not academia.
Oh it's really easy to extrapolate stuff. But perhaps they shouldn't. A lot of papers I've seen recently have wild romantic extrapolations based on cherry picked correlations.
Some of the social sciences are terrible at this. A former partner was a researcher in one of what I now consider to be less respectable fields and she would come up with a feely conclusion and fit the data to it and publish it. Wanted me to co-author one with her and do the statistical analysis. Told her I don't want to be on Retraction Watch.
That could explain how the lead poisoning crowd took over. No, there won't be any retractions, you will be "educated" that you are stupid, "anti science", and too stupid to understand the newly discovered "fact".
It is perfectly reasonable to assume lead would affect people 2000 years ago the same way it does today. Human biology hasn't changed.
1. Lactose Tolerance: The ability to digest lactose as adults evolved in populations with a history of dairy farming, such as those in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
2. Disease Resistance: Genetic adaptations to diseases like malaria (e.g., sickle cell trait) have become more common in certain regions.
3. Skin Pigmentation: Variations in skin color have continued to adapt to UV exposure in different regions, influenced by migration and interbreeding.
4. Height and Physique: Improved nutrition and health care have led to an increase in average height and changes in body composition in many populations.
5. Wisdom Teeth: A gradual decrease in jaw size has made wisdom teeth less functional, and they are increasingly absent in some populations.
6. Brain Function: While the brain's size and structure remain unchanged, shifts in cognitive demands and education have influenced how we use our brains.
-- https://let-me-ChatGPT-that-for-you/search?q=how+has+human+b...
And none of that is at all relevant to how lead affects the human brain and so is completely useless. You should have asked it "Would lead lower IQ in humans 2000 years ago the same way it does today?" This is what DeepSeekv3 says:
Yes, lead exposure would have likely had similar detrimental effects on human cognition and IQ 2000 years ago as it does today. Lead is a neurotoxin that interferes with the development and function of the brain, particularly in children. Its harmful effects on intelligence, behavior, and overall health are well-documented in modern studies, and these effects would have been the same in the past, even if they were not understood at the time.
What a horrible reference. I hope this doesn’t become a thing.
I thought so too, at first.
Then I realized this is better than common daily occurrences like, "it's perfectly reasonable to assume human biology does not change in 2000 years".
At least this is amusing!
The effect that lead has on the human brain has not changed.
Would have implies they didn't use lead buy if they had it would have lowered IQs
May have lowered IQs based on extrapolation and modern studies
Might be a better way to put it
Both are valid ways of using "would have", in this case I'm using it as the past tense of "will have". But I appreciate the ambiguity it creates.
> We use "would have" as the past tense form of will have:
>> I phoned at six o'clock. I knew he would have got home by then.
Note the difference between this and:
> I phoned at six o'clock. I knew he was home by then.
Which implies first-hand knowledge of his location. The first only signals a logical conclusion.
https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-gram...
> models to presume some levels of cognitive effects.
Not "presume", "deduce" or "conclude".
> 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.
Wow. We mock those stupid Romans for putting lead in their drinking water supply, but we literally vaporized it and had everyone inhale it for decades so it'd go straight to the bloodstream.
Still do :) all the GA piston planes flying above you are still running leaded fuel.
The majority, but not all - some run on UL91 or even "mogas" (unleaded fuel from the petrol station).
Some of the smaller airports in the Bay Area (HWD, RHV, SQL) have UL94 but not all (PAO, HAF, and the large ones SJC, SFO, OAK don't). Fuel from a petrol station off field doesn't do you a lot of good, and it really doesn't help if you're refueling en route.
Incidentally, aerospace Youtuber Scott Manley just did an excellent deep dive on lead in aviation gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zfIy17q9sE
> we literally vaporized it and had everyone inhale it for decades
this is a massive scandal that has not been fully understood in public AFAIK. Extensive documentation of the false premise of leaded gasoline has been published, e.g.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...
2.5-3 micrograms per deciliter is nothing. Wouldn’t even come up as elevated by current childhood screening guidelines. I very much doubt 2-3 IQ point difference.
That's the average, so it would be much high the cities in the cities than rurally right?
I wouldn't call it nothing.
Current regulation requires water supply at the tap to measure <10 µg/L, changing to <5 µg/L next decade.
2-3 µg/L is significant.
You are comparing level in the blood and water.
Worse the parent says 2-3 μg/dL or 20-30 μg/L right?
> reducing their IQ by 2.5 to 3 points
I seem to recall reading an article that observed that every time we do a study of the effect of lead exposure on IQ, it gets larger.
IQs aren't changing much, but lead exposure is going down, and so we keep imputing the same IQ gaps to ever-smaller quantities of lead.
IQs aren't changing much
Isn't IQ a comparative representation of one's standing within their contemporary age group?
My understanding is that within a given group the median should be 100. So you won't see it change between groups. This is highly relevant when you're talking about different groups being exposed to different concentrations of lead.
As an extreme example to make the point, if people born in 1970 were all exposed to high concentrations of lead and were all morons as a result, their median IQ is still 100.
Then people born in 2000 are exposed to far less lead and are super smart, but their median IQ would still be 100.
Points above or below 100 are merely a specification of how many fractions of a standard deviation above or below that median within the given age group a person's performance is measured to be.
That said, even within a group, 2.5 - 3 points seems largely insignificant as an individual's score might vary more than this depending on which day of the week they took the test. It seems a big stretch to draw any scientific conclusion from such a small variance.
You're right about how IQ is measured with 100 being the average and, generally, 15 points being a standard deviation. But numerous tests also record raw scores and these can be compared between generations. Scandiland and other places with compulsory conscription + IQ testing are the goldmine here. This is what led to the observation of the 'Flynn Effect' - the observation that IQ between generations was increasing, and later to its apparent reversal that generally started sometime around 1990 in the developed world. [1] That paper reports a later date, because it's about America in which studies on this topic lagged substantially behind Europe.
It's not easily explained by things like immigration since it is also present (though less pronounced) even within families. The hypothesis I find most compelling is that IQ levels have "naturally" been declining for decades, but improvements in nutrition, education, etc were helping to offset, and even rise beyond, these declines. But as nutrition, education, etc reach the point of diminishing returns, the declines dominate.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
> The hypothesis I find most compelling is that IQ levels have "naturally" been declining for decades
You find compelling the idea that organisms naturally get dumber with each successive generation? What possible mechanism would cause IQ levels to "naturally" decline? Have they been naturally declining since the dawn of civilization? Since LUCA? Shouldn't the expectation be that without other causes, IQ levels would remain roughly constant throughout generations?
I think there are two distinct branches of reasons. The first is probably what you're asking about - what environmental factor(s) could be lowering IQ. And I think there are countless possibilities there, but many are quite subjective or at least unproven. The trendy one in academic circles is air pollution as a cause (seems uncompelling to me, unless China suddenly sees a dramatic decline in urban IQ). I'd also add endless entertainment, urbanization/industrialization creating low trust societies, labor swapping from widely skilled self employment to narrowly skilled employment, chemicals/microplastics/etc that we consume in food/water, and so on.
But there's also the most objective and straightforward reason as well - evolution. As far as evolution is concerned IQ isn't good or bad, it's just another highly heritable trait. When it correlates against fertility (as it currently does), IQs will decrease over time. When it correlates with fertility (as it likely did when life was more difficult), they will increase over time.
The problem with IQ is that it measures the cerebellum. People who lack abstract thinking will learn to rely on the patterns and statistics, and intuitively score high on the tests. The second problem is that people who don't have abstract thinking don't comprehend abstract thinking, and so they think that people with abstract thinking are dumb.
The explanation is that IQ measures the cerebellum, and the declining nutrition and increasing brain damage forces people to rely more on the cerebellum, the statistical engine, instead of abstract thinking.
Hmmm, I could imagine microplastics, PFAS, artificial dies, excessive and unhealthy amounts of sugar would all have a deleterious effect on IQ. Perhaps even specifically pre frontal cortex, etc.
Though that goes against Europe hitting the decline earlier than the US which leads in sugars and unhealthy foods.
There is nothing wrong with sugar, people can't burn it, because the body needs lead to break it into pyruvate. Then you need arsenic to input that into the krebs cycle. The mitochondria need a wide assortment of metals (likely at least copper, arsenic, selenium, mercury, cadmium and possibly chromium) when you don't get those, your mitochondia begin to fail, and the tissues where they do turn into "fat tissue".
I suspect they don't do the research for real, they do some kind of simulation, and write it was in mice. They do know the metal changes the protein, but they incorrectly claim that the version without it works, but in reality the one with it does. They could'n make such an error if they actually did the research for real.
>Then people born in 2000 are exposed to far less lead and are super smart,
What do you base this on?
It's clearly meant as a hypothetical example.
AFAIK, no, 100 IQ points at 25 and 18 or any other age are the same "brain power".
Not at all. There is different age groups.
You're basically right about the relative nature of IQ scores, but you're wrong about the comparison being drawn.
To impute the effect of lead, you look at a bunch of people, measure the amount of lead in their blood, measure their IQs, and see how much of a difference there is between people with a lot of lead and people with less or none.
Modern poor people who live in crummy areas where there's still a little bit of lead are about as stupid, relative to the leadless elite, as poor people from decades past who lived in crummy areas which, at the time, had a lot more lead than they do now.
It seems like a safe assumption that the effect of lead on people with negligible lead levels has stayed constant over the decades at indistinguishable-from-zero.
But for lead to explain the gap between the lead-haves and the lead-have-nots, its effect must have increased dramatically over that same period. That gap hasn't changed. But lead levels have plummeted.
The elites have always been the highest in lead. Slaves etc. had none.
You have a very different mental picture of America over "decades past" than most people do.
People are downvoting, but yes this is accurate.
There are confounders between houses with lead and other demographics and contribute to the gap and aren't completely controlled — aspects of social class and low mobility that are hard to explicitly capture, it's all old housing.
So as the lead level drops and the gap remains steady (increasingly dominated by the confounding factors), more and more IQ gap gets attributed to the small lead-level gap between those living in old housing with abated lead pipes + paint and new pipes + new paint.
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Why specifically call out fluoride?
It's a bit of a thing with a particular political persuasion in the US right now (RFK Jr has made his anti-fluoride position a big part of his deal for his future role as Secretary of Health and Human Services), and there was a report in the news recently that some see as backing up the claims against fluoride:
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2025-01-06/what-a-new-...
It's not as conclusive a study as some people might claim, though:
> For starters, 52 of the 74 studies were judged by the report authors to have a “high risk of bias.” That undermines the validity and reliability of their results.
> Another issue is that most of the studies considered fluoride exposures far above the target level for the U.S. ... Only seven of the studies assessed children whose water contained less than 1.5 mg/L of fluoride. When they were considered on their own, there was no relationship between fluoride exposure and IQ.
nothing to do with RFK or politics, I feel like people are missing the point here though, imagine Rome in 45 BC “why call out lead?” while Roberto F Kenedius has been spreading conspiracies about lead pipes being bad
Does your point have nothing to do with RFK, or is the point people are missing that RFK has been spreading conspiracy theories that might be real after all? I'm somewhat confused by the seeming contradiction.
nothing to do with RFK I was just piggybacking on the other comment mentioning him to further paint the original picture: history repeating itself, future culture trying to understand past culture by limited speculation, and future culture (being the present culture) that will eventually be the past culture and every present culture tends to think they understand things better than they actually do, so it’s fun to think of us talking about Rome and lead in water, and future culture talking about us and Fluoride in water, regardless of how accurate any of it is or related to “empire collapse”, funny to imagine there was someone back then saying claims about lead being possibly harmful are biased, whatever the personal motive was (ie, not wanting to believe they let their kids drink dangerous lead pipe water so they go out of their way to tell others that claims of lead being suspected to be dangerous are biased, which is itself a bias)
> It's a bit of a thing with a particular political persuasion...
That seems dismissive as hell, especially since the US is the odd man out here by choosing to medicate their water supply.
You could have simply answered that both fluoride and lead seem to lower IQ so using either as an additive would be questionable.
> the US is the odd man out here by choosing to medicate their water supply
It is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country
> You could have simply answered that both fluoride and lead seem to lower IQ so using either as an additive would be questionable.
This would have inaccurately reflected my understanding of the science: the link between fluoride and IQ is far more tenuous than lead at this point. See the study in the link above.
> That seems dismissive as hell, especially since the US is the odd man out here by choosing to medicate their water supply.
It's not intended to be dismissive, it's the primary reason why someone would have fluoride and IQ on their mind at the moment.
“Why specifically call out lead?”
-Julius Caesar, 45 BC
Didn’t studies come out connecting it to lower IQ? Places are pulling it or planning to pull it, nothing to do with RFK.
It's an international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
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Lots of people across the world don't have fluoride in their water, you could compare populations right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country
I doubt you can do a clean comparison, likely too many confounding factors, at least to pull anything out easily.
If someone thinks they can figure out 1500 years from now if the 'fall of the west' was because of fluoride, it's probably easier to look at the countries in the west that do and don't use it now.
that’s the joke, today we are like “huh… lead in water, IQ, fall of Rome!” and that was more than 1500 years ago I think
I 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?
I haven't read it, but the book History of Toxicology and Environmental Health [0] would say that pipes were not a problem. Preparing food and wine in lead containers could have been a problem, but it wasn't until centuries after the Roman Empire "fell" that doctors even described the symptoms of lead poisoning.
And to throw in another quote from a scholarly source, "Water from the river Anio, which fed two of Rome's principal aqueducts, the Aqua Anio Vetus and Aqua Anio Novus, was particularly hard and conveyed high levels of dissolved calcium carbonate. Indeed, Frontinus complains in his treatise on the aqueducts of Rome, that "the accumulation of deposit, which sometimes hardens into a crust, contracts the channel of the water" (CXXII.1)." [1]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128153390/toxicology-...
[1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/lead...
I hope I can be forgiven for replying to myself, but at this timestamp, I've got three excellent replies affirming the "lead pipes get gunked up and it stops being a notable problem" concept.
Thanks for the replies! Great stuff from all of you.
> would say that pipes were not a problem.
You obviously would prefer non-lead pipes, but running the water for a period before using flushes out any lead if the pipes are in the house. Like you say in your comment, it's when water sits in a container like a wine vat where leeching has time to accumulate.
That's a great reply, thanks, and seems to align with the "pipes just get clogged up" concept I read some time ago.
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.
I don't know if I would call Flint's water just "slightly" acidic. It was acidic enough for the Flint hospital to complain about their stainless steel sinks rusting, for local automotive plants to dig their own wells because it was destroying parts they were washing, and turned their entire water supply system into swiss cheese that had to be replaced. It might be slightly acidic compared to highly concentrated acids, but in terms of potable water it seems extremely corrosive.
Of course you are right, and no offense meant. I grew up in Flint, and have family there to this day. My intention was more to communicate that even small changes in water PH can affect this mineralization layer.
What I rarely see talked about with regard to Flint's water supply is that Detroit was willing to give them water for free, which is documented, and the only explanation that makes sense as to why they weren't taken up on the offer is the state governor's cabinet connections to fracking and a pipeline intended to bring lakewater inland to facilitate fracking. They wanted the taxpayers of Flint to help foot the bill. See: http://banmichiganfracking.org/the-flint-water-connection-to...
Yes, the piping in my parents’ house is all lead, but not worth replacing due to the above. It’s pretty common in old houses in Britain
Very interesting. I recently found out the house I grew up in in the UK over 15+ years had lead pipes that were never replaced, and I always wondered why they were not replaced and if it had some cognitive impact. This lining effect likely explains the reason, and offers at least some reassurance.
If the water PH changes, the value in replacing those pipes might become more apparent.
But my sweet water!
I wonder how did you figure out this is the case, did you make any tests of the water?
I can hardly imagine living in a house with lead pipes. I mean even if water if provably safe today, what if tomorrow PH shifts to acidity.
I have some late-19th-century books on plumbing that mention the same passivation layer, and so clearly it was known, along with some of the toxic effects of lead, back when it was widely used for plumbing (which I must also mention that the 'plumb' comes from 'plumbum' - Latin for lead.)
Also when talking about downfall. I think it is also sensible question timeframe when these materials were first used. Was that during raise of empire or after it? As it feels wrong that something that had been used for generations during formation of empire would lead to downfall...
There must be something, as I grew in a house with lead pipes, and while I will not disclose my IQ or that of my siblings, they are high. Or maybe we were lucky? Of course only anecdotical data.
I can't help but be pedantic and point out that since IQ is normalized, their average IQ would be 100 whether or not they used lead.
More philosophically, the condition of life is inherently susceptible to damage, so you practically have to draw the line at what level of damage you want to try and mitigate given the realities of the time. Do you want to be wrapped up, only breathing, eating, and drinking perfectly calibrated mixes of chemicals?
Who are you, who are so wise in the Ways of Science?
> 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.
So if my generation had lead levels 3-4 X higher than Roman kids, does this explain the “Exams are getting easier” meme - that exams are staying the same, but kids really are getting smarter …
( also the hey exams were waaay harder in the Edwardian Era meme?)
Exams are getting easier, because children are getting dumber, and wouldn't pass if they stayed the same.
I 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.
> By some estimates, the Roman empire amounted to more than 80 million people at its peak, meaning that about a quarter of the world’s population could have been exposed to the lead pollution generated by mining and smelting. The effects of lead poisoning can be so severe that scholars have debated whether it contributed to the fall of the empire.
I wonder what will happen to current empires from micro- and nano-plastics, PFAS, airpolution, as well as harmful yet popular habits like doomscrolling and games addictions.
I 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).
I was imagining something a bit more impactful (and easy to find in the data), because as far as that one goes, it's not clear why anyone should know or care.
Maybe high school graduation rate (an inverse proxy to indicate bullying)?
Obviously not as easy to screen for, but this is a very clear indicator of how strong the known adverse effects of plasticizers are.
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].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8910189/
I find it interesting that the article you linked didn't mention the heritability of ADHD. In around 3/4ths[0] of cases ADHD is caused by genetics, which leaves plenty of space for other causes.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0070-0
Next do fluoride.
That’s been “debunked” though right?
For those that didn’t get the memo: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/06/health/children-higher-fluori...
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/are-plastics-killing-us
Oh gosh... "insidious castration of all men" and "blurred gender roles". Really? They have been blurry for all of homo sapiens existence, just think of the matriarchal societies that still exist today[0]. Gender dysphoria has been documented from individuals[1] for a long time, societies accepted a third gender since ancient time and even in the USA, the Cercle Hermaphroditos[2] was quite early to the party, being founded in 1895 (yes 130 years ago).
I'm confident that plastic will go the way trees did: Unbothered for a long time until bacteria figured dead wood is just another food and put a stop to trees being fossilized as coal.
Stop plastics, it's a good idea to do so for many reasons, but there's no need to drag gender roles and those stupid good old times into it. I much prefer spending time with my kid instead of slaving away 9-5 six days a week.
[0] https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g2856528... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_ben_Kalonymus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cercle_Hermaphroditos
It doesn't seem as if the principal researcher behind this result is a historian:
https://www.dri.edu/directory/joe-mcconnell/
Has plastic been linked to lower IQ?
If anything, the correlation might be the opposite --- look at plasticiser use in East Asian countries, for example.
Not yet, I think the OP means it might in the future.
Roman lead pipes were not a significant factor on the health of humans back then... To the same extent as public sewers, bathing, hygiene rules etc. Rome had it a lot better than even some countries today. Yeah you still had to deal with infections and such which could have been deadly but time and medicine era that you were in you had way better health outcomes in Rome
You seem to have missed the third paragraph of the article.
Its more about lead kettles in which a sweet whine/ sugary additive was boiled down?
Original paper https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2419630121
-----
Note this isn't mainly about lead pipes:
"most significant... may have been through background air pollution from mining and smelting of silver and lead ores "
> smelting of silver and lead ores
The smelting of silver and lead is detectable via ice cores, I remember seeing a graph showing the height of Roman silver production was only matched in the 18th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy#/media/File:Worl...
Would love to see a similar study on fluoride in modern civilizations.
Fluoride has two major differences that would complicate such a study: First, fluoride is a natural component of lots of drinking water (often at levels far higher than artificial fluoridation creates), while lead contamination in drinking water is rare and usually human-caused. Second, lead is known to be bad for one's health in any amount, while fluoride is only known to cause IQ drops above a certain dose.
You might find this meta-analysis interesting: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Part of that conclusion (note that water fluoridation in the US is recommended to a level of 0.7 mg/L):
> This systematic review and meta-analysis found inverse associations and a dose-response association between fluoride measurements in urine and drinking water and children’s IQ across the large multicountry epidemiological literature. There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.
Headline writers were the original click baiters - understandable to get opens but really harms the substance of the article, which is that increase in lead poisoning may have had debilitating impact on the Roman Empire.
Is a 2-3 point IQ drop really that terrible?
If we all suddenly went from 100% to 97% brain efficiency we wouldn't even notice. For example a bad night of sleep is surely worth 10 times as much.
Or even measurable reliably? What is the typical error bar for an IQ test? Also is only kind of estimation based on what is known today about lead...
Hmm, the IQ test was invented hundreds of years after the Fall of Rome.
This article correlates 100% with bad causal statements. Garum, anyone?
Interestingly this paper probably underestimates things since it is not evaluating food sources, such as lead sweetened wine commonly drunk by the elites. I suspect the effects were non trivial.
Similarly, 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.
"Did arsenic poisoning make gods limp?" Apparently going lame was an occupational hazard. https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/03/31/4206279.h...
It was common from 4000 BC to 2000 BC. Ötzi the iceman lived near a copper-arsenic forge site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenical_bronze#Arsenical_bro...
There's a new study that suggests, actually not so much:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42513706 ("Ancient copper industry in King Solomon's mines did not pollute environment")
- "...We took hundreds of soil samples from both sites for chemical analyses, creating high-resolution maps of heavy metal presence in the region. We found that pollution levels at the Timna copper mining sites are extremely low and confined to the locations of the ancient smelting furnaces. [...] The new study contradicts a series of papers published since the 1990s about pollution caused allegedly by the ancient copper industry."
Interesting. Thanks
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.
Still widely used in military/aerospace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plating#Cadmium_plating
Also in pigments. There still has to be lots and lots of old devices, paint in houses, glass ware etc. around that derive their color from Cadmium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_pigments
I mean, I can do better (worse). Up until .. the 60s? 70s? They used to literally spray lead-arsenate on apple orchards as a pesticide.
Incredibly effective one, too.
Just that unfortunate thing of poisoning the top soil forever.
A lot of those old apple orchards have had other things done with them since. Which is kind of scary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_hydrogen_arsenate
"US EPA banned use of lead arsenate on food crops in 1988."
Re arsenic poisoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestus#:~:text=In%20the%20....
Yes, 19th century Britain was already well on its way out of the nastiness.
And the first industrial revolution was already over.
I don't know much about Britain's historical usage of bronze alloys, but I would be surprised if Britain used all that much arsenic bronze at all because Cornwall has some of of the largest and oldest tin mines in the world. But of course mining and metal processing in general has tons of nasty things besides just arsenic.
Isn't the average IQ of a population supposed to remain at a 100? Also pretty sure the Romans didn't measure IQ.
Anyway, I'm really tired of those "Stupid claim, study finds".
Skeptical
Lead contamination is still fairly widespread: carrots, sweet potatoes, chocolate, spices. It’s a good idea to get your blood tested and try to find any sources of exposure if your levels are high.
As a child born in 1970 that loved the smell of gasoline, I really wish I could test how many IQ points I lost. I tell my kids it must be at least 15, because they are much smarter than me!
Wait until you hear about leaded gas!
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Now do the same study for smartphone abuse and third world immigration
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Rome fell after they stopped using lead.
There is no evidence whatsoever that lead was widely known to be toxic, until a group of conspirationists took over the academia. In fact such a belief couldn't have been widespread. The historical quotes appear to be fabricated.
In fact it's essential. Roman sewers and sanitation quickly flushed it down the drain, by 235 it was in chaos, long distance trade was no longer possible and a thousand years long dark age ensued. The original depletion happened deep in prehistory, the most major event happening around 26kya. Also by ice cores, substantiated by geological changes and mammoth skeletons.
Wow, somebody is still repeating 60 historical stuff.
I suspect a similarly ugly reality is what happened in Cambodia after Pol Pot's genocide. It's done very poorly compared to its neighbors.
…and that brought us Christianity
Athena was much cooler.
Is IQ really that important?
I mean, if your goal is to get from point A to point B, having a fast car just means you go there faster.
I'm thinking of IQ in a similar way, as in - high IQ = faster car. But at the end of the day, it's still the same, isn't it? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If you have IQ 50, it's not just that you do things slower than other people, you can't do many things at all.
Even worse: if you have an IQ of 100, there are lots of things you just can't do. And if you have an IQ of 120? Still lots of things you just can't do. Same with 140. And it doesn't even stop there.
Could you share some examples for what you mean?
There are two different form of understandability that comes to my mind,
1. Things that you don't understand because you don't have the necessary background knowledge, 2. And the things you'd fundamentally never understand because of the limitations of your own mind, which is, limited by the IQ.
I' assuming you're trying to mean the second version here.
Yes it matters. Faster car can run more miles in a day. More IQ can do more work.
Unfortunately for that we have computers so we don't need high IQ to do more work like calculations but higher quality work (which also depends on what kind of work you're doing) and that is oftentimes not primarily related to high IQ (think of creative work)
Is that really true? That IQ is often not related to capacity to do valuable intellectual work in the modern world?
IQ measures reasoning capability, not speed of mental calculations.
I think you're right. (Did some ChatGPTing, and found this one holds).
But still, I don't believe IQ alone can improve your reasoning capability, could it? Like with proper education, and knowledge, a person with average IQ would more likely be able to see the correct patterns, and connections between ideas, than a high IQ person without the required education would.
It's like - having the proper education, trumps the meaning of having a high IQ. But, it's true, given the similar environment, I'd assume, the high IQ person would do better.
I wrote about this last year and everyone here picked on me calling my article AI generated, so I shut down my curiosity blog.
Reading through the submission, it looks like hardly anyone replied or upvoted, the replies seemed like constructive criticism, you acknowledged that you used AI, and you used "we" throughout replies to the feedback. Even in the absence of the article for context, what you are saying now doesn't seem like a fair assessment on behalf of the community, at least from the comment section's side. I will acknowledge there are lowlife trolls who lurk HN, but also flagging an article that is largely created by AI seems reasonable.
Womp womp