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Ancient Mongols messed up the environment worse than we do
Shayne Jacopian for redOrbit.com – @ShayneJacopian
You may have thought that excessive pollution didn’t really start until industrialization in the last couple of centuries, but a new study finds that pollution was actually worse thousands of years ago than it is today.
University of Pittsburgh graduate student Aubrey Hillman sampled sediment from Lake Erhai in the Yunnan province of southwestern China, near Kublai Khan’s silver mines and an area where metal artifacts had been found.
Examining the samples, Hillman and her colleagues found that lead pollution in Lake Erhai was 119 micrograms per gram in 1300 BCE and didn’t decline much until around 1400 CE, with the peak pollution levels being three to four times higher than what’s generated by modern metallurgy.
[STORY: Genghis Khan's lost military base discovered in southwest Mongolia]
So don’t beat yourself up, 21st century-ers. Yeah, we have room to improve, but at least we’re not 13th century BCE Mongols.
Hillman writes that pollution—high lead concentration, in particular—like this can have a lasting negative impact on aquatic life, and she estimates that about 1/6 of China’s arable land has an excess amount of heavy metals.
So…we’ve been permanently messing up the environment for longer than we thought!
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113348669/ancient-mongols-messed-up-the-environment-worse-than-we-do-030915/
