The persistence of bad information

So there's a fun video on Youtube about how Krakatoa destroyed the world in 535 CE. Unfortunately, the video was made in 1999 and we have learned a lot since then, so it becomes just another urban legend. 

The eruption definitely happened and it definitely was as severe as they say. Its results no doubt included the oldest recorded episode of bubonic plague. But we learned in, for example, 2012, that syphilis existed in Pompeii before the Vesuvius eruption, and in England in the 1200s CE. The Columbian origin of syphilis was invented by Jean Astruc in the 1700s. His other claim to infamy is inventing Documentary Hypothesis, which has a zero probability of being true due to false facts and fallacies of logic. You can read about that here. So people may have been getting bubonic plague for centuries, it's just that its symptoms were not recorded or at least not recorded well enough to recognize. 

One of the pieces of information used in the video is the Grail story from France, to suggest that England was devastated. The Grail story cited is from the 1200s CE French Vulgate cycle. All 8 volumes are available in facsimile on Internet Archive, in the early French in which they were written. Is it reliable?

If this were a record of an oral tradition, it would have examples of what Axel Olrik documented in Principles for Oral Narrative Research, about which I wrote here. One of Olrik’s findings is that oral traditions always begin from a cultural or historical reality. Written material – not so much. There are examples of Olrik's principles in the Jewish Torah, the Mahabharata, the Popul Vuh, the Romance of Three Kingdoms, as well as Africa's Mwindo epic and Sumerian mythology, Greek mythology and the fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers.

The French Vulgate starts out as a representation of part of Christian history. By the 1200s, it could have copied from older written works. It could also contain elements of French Christian oral tradition. The repeated sets of threes at the start of the first volume point that way; so do the repeated sets of threes at the start of the Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms.

But the Vulgate brings in a character missing from the Welsh Triads with their references to Arthur’s court. Lancelot has no origin in the Triads. He is in the Vulgate so as to be the greatest knight in the world in the material sense, only to be overthrown by his son Galahad who is greater in a moral sense. The point of Galahad’s superiority is that he gets to see the Grail, a Christian concept. There’s more resemblance in this to the Aeneid, a work invented in writing by Vergil to connect the Aeneas of the Iliad’s Troy, with Roman Romulus and Remus, and their political heir Augustus.  Whatever oral elements exist in the Vulgate, they represent a) examples of Olrik's principles and therefore they are not culture-specific; b) French Christian culture not British Christian culture; and c) medieval culture, not the culture of 7 centuries earlier. So we can't use the French Vulgate as evidence for the supposed destruction of British and Irish culture in the 500s CE, after which the Anglo-Saxons took over.

What evidence exists for a disaster in Britain in the 500s CE? How do we identify a population collapse or bottleneck? One way is through DNA. For example, the Jewish and Samaritan kohens who are descended in the male line from Aharon, the brother of Moshe, really do have a solid male DNA relationship that is unique. There is no such DNA evidence for Levites not descended from Aharon. The reason is easy to see. Kohens cannot marry widows or divorcees, meaning that the children of their wives are their children. The other Levites could have married widows or divorcees who were pregnant by their former husbands, no matter what precautions were taken.

At the time of filming, and even more so when Keys was doing his research, DNA analysis was in its infancy. The human genome project started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. Only after that could the data be analyzed to identify human populations and their migrations. The facts show that in London, up to 50% of men have Y-chromosome DNA that is Celtic, and of course it is better than 75% in Ireland. That means a population of Celtic males from west (with higher percentages) to southeast. The old supposition that in the 500s, the Anglo-Saxons nearly wiped out the British, who retreated to Wales, doesn’t hold water. The percentage is lower in the east due to immigration, but it should be much closer to zero if the Celtic population there was wiped out.

In the east of England, in the Anglo-Saxon settlements, there are also Celtic material remains. It’s either a sign of peaceful trade or of peaceful coexistence. The latter leads to the lower but well above zero percentage of male Celtic DNA in London.

What probably happened was that British settlement habits were decentralized. You’ll understand this better when I tell you that in the U.S. in 1800, 95% of residents were rural, not urban. That’s 14 centuries after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, at a time when the U.S. was putting up monumental buildings for our new government.

In Britain in the 500s CE, centers included Roman fortifications, but they were visited by traders more than they were settled by the British, and the settlers had no reason to stay once the Romans withdrew. Bath as a center of Roman culture did not long survive the Roman withdrawal, showing that the British had no nostalgia for Roman culture and did not consider centralization important even after a couple of centuries of experience. Nor did they acquire the habit of monumental building from the Romans; they got it from Christianity. The Canterbury cathedral was built in 507 – before the “British devastation” while the Anglo-Saxons were still mostly pagan.

The "Celts being wiped out" urban legend no doubt has a number of roots. One is Augustine's mission to Christianize the Anglo-Saxons. Britain and Ireland had been Christian for a century or so, but the Saxons in Germany remained pagan until Charlemagne converted them by force. 

It’s not possible that Pope Gregory didn’t know about the Christians in Britain, Ireland and Scotland. Sending Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons does not require that the British had been wiped out. They were already Christian and Gregory didn’t have to worry about them, unless he objected to them not forcing conversion on the Anglo-Saxons. Whoever started the myth of “Celts being wiped out,” however, all the scribes in England had to stick to that story. 

That myth stroked the egos of the Victorians, who were ruled by Germans. England was bigoted against Catholicism in general and the Irish in particular. It would have been an inconvenient truth that at the same time as Augustine's mission to England, Irish (and Scots) missions to Europe brought with them copies of Christian texts that had survived in Ireland but disappeared from Europe during the pagan invasions. These missions went on for half a century after the "catastrophe" supposedly wiped out pre-Saxon culture in the British Isles. Travel requires a reliable source of food at every point along the road; it's called logistics, and missions don't work in a devastated landscape that can't support its own inhabitants, in the same way as Napoleon's forces dwindled to relatively nothing on the retreat from Moscow over land subjected to a "scorched earth" policy.

There’s also material evidence of population in Britain. Before the Anglo-Saxons revived London as a port, trade was still coming in at Cornwall, the most important Celtic port on the island, with access to the western mines. Through this port, no doubt, came the African red slip ware found in British sites that date to the time that the Celts supposedly fled to the Welsh mountains. ARSW was a luxury product. Somebody had the money to buy it in the middle of the "catastrophe". This was an opening for the bubonic plague to reach England from Byzantium. Not from Europe, where the Roman Empire was in freefall. From Africa; the plague started in Ethiopia.

Since the Celts were not wiped out, there’s no reason to suppose that plague reached the British Isles during the “catastrophe”. We’ll need actual plague victims for that. The French Vulgate claims of devastation are an exaggeration, possibly modeled on the jeremiads in the Pentateuch. France itself didn’t undergo devastation.

The video tries to claim that France and Spain formed at this time due to the effects of the catastrophe. What we currently know about France and Spain of the 500s supports no such claim. The Frankish kingdom under the Merovingians had its capital at Paris at this time. There is no chronological coordination between their decline and the Krakatoa eruption, and in any case the Capetians were there to take up the slack. Likewise in Spain the Arian Visigothic kingdoms were in full swing. They tried to invade Africa, although they failed. 

The video ignores China except to say they were glad to see the Avars migrate west and bother somebody else (Byzantium). The final collapse of the Han Dynasty occurred in the 380s CE, over a century before the eruption. If the "catastrophe" was as bad as Keys wants us to think, China might have stayed split into the Northern and Southern Dynasties for 300 years. It didn't. The Mandate of Heaven passed, and the Sui Dynasty formed by the 590s CE. It was a natural and normal event captured in the aphorism at the start of the Romance of Three Kingdoms: 话说天下大势，分久必合，合久必分,the general trend is that what is divided tends to unite; once united, it tends to divide.

The video never mentions India, which is a hell of a lot closer to Krakatoa than England. The decline at the end of the Gupta period coordinates with the attacks of the Alchon Huns and the way they damaged trade outside the subcontinent. Buddhism suffered a decline due to persecution. There was also a horrible flood -- not after the desiccation caused by the eruption, but almost at the time the eruption occurred -- in the Bihar region that was a mainstay of the Gupta empire. If nobody has looked for evidence of the Krakatoa eruption in India, it's possibly because there are strong reasons for why the Guptas fell, independent of the eruption.

Ignoring India is an example of the fallacy of sampling bias. When you commit sampling bias, you fail the Test of Occam's Razor and your conclusions cannot be accepted.

Sure, there is evidence of volcanic eruptions. There is evidence in Ireland of the Thera eruption of 1628 BCE that devastated Minoan culture on Thera and Palaikastro, which were some 160 kilometers apart. (Ireland is over 4,000 kilometers from Thera.) There could be deposits from an eruption of the 530s CE – but not of Krakatoa.

What did happen, then? Well, look at the fact that two of the biggest cities in the world suffered depopulation at the time. But you can't blame it all on Krakatoa. Keys did not know about Ilopango, in El Salvador, which was much closer to Teotihuacan than Krakatoa was. The data on Ilopango mostly was published after 2000. Ilopango would have had a much worse effect on Teotihuacan than Krakatoa, but Keys wouldn't have known about that, nor would it have been reflected in the video. There is, however, a different Youtube video that covers it. 

If there's ash in Ireland from 535 CE give or take, it is more likely to have an Ilopango chemical signature than a Krakatoa one, although El Salvador is almost twice as far from Ireland as Thera is. Probably it was darker or the sunsets were redder and the temperatures cooler than before the two eruptions, more so than what happened in the 1880s after the smaller Krakatoa eruption. But it didn’t wipe out the Celts.

So there's a double reason why the 500s CE was such a bad time in human history, but it doesn't add up to global collapse of civilization. Keys could only claim what he did because of something I talk about on my Gibbon thread. You always have to look at the provenance of the information and then see if there's later information available. If you don't, you're going to fall for claims that have been overturned, or even fall for an urban legend that you can't disbelieve because you don't know enough.