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The current drought reminds us that water, which has been so important for human development in the past, is also important today. Historically, its scarcity has caused catastrophes and great transformations; Ensuring supply has been a priority for all societies.
Iberian Peninsula. The great invasions and conquests are not explained only by the ambition of kings and leaders, but behind them there are other factors such as environmental factors and the control of resources. A recent study indicates that the drought that weakened the Visigoths was fundamental in the invasion of the Peninsula by the Muslims. Later, for centuries, the so-called Reconquista took place, although there are more and more experts who reject that name.
Latin America. The Mayans developed a very sophisticated system to save, purify and store water that worked for centuries. The urban reservoir system has one of the most notable examples in Tikal, where a single reservoir served to satisfy the needs of 80,000 people. However, not even this mechanism could deal with the last great drought, which condemned this town.
Mesopotamia. Southern Mesopotamia can be considered the cradle of urban civilization. It was in Uruk, the first city, where social, economic and cultural systems emerged that still have an impact today. However, the splendor of the Sumerian city would not have been possible if the water supply had not been guaranteed and managed.
Israel. No matter how much technology has evolved, water is just as important in contemporary times as it was in ancient times. And this becomes especially evident when armed conflicts occur, in which basic supplies to the population are seriously put in question. We see it in urban fighting in Israel and it has been seen in times of bombing during World War II.
Packs of wolves in the sea. Water, in this case sea, was the protagonist of one of the most dramatic fronts of the Second World War, when the German submarines, the feared U-boats, put Allied transports in check. Life in these deadly submersibles (deadly for the enemy but often also for the crew) and their role in the Battle of the Atlantic are the subject of the latest installment of the History and Life podcast.
Osage tragedy. The premiere of the film The Moon Killers, by Martin Scorsese, has brought the tragedy of the Osage people to the present day. This article by Torivio Fodder, professor at the University of Arizona, puts this drama in the context of a larger one, the persecution and extermination of Native Americans. From his point of view, the culprits were not the colonists, but the US government itself. Read in the Spanish version of The Conversation.
Rescue the past. The effort to rescue the memory of those murdered in concentration camps is experiencing great momentum on the internet. The Flossenbürg memorial camp, in collaboration with the Auschwitz camp, has launched an online archive with the profiles of almost 900,000 victims. To get an idea of ??the magnitude of these crimes and their global reach, a quick search shows, for example, a total of 650 people from Barcelona and almost 500 people from Madrid.
Technology, fear and recklessness. Technological advances are often received with misgivings that over time prove to be unjustified; It happens today and has happened in the past. This is the case of the long debate about whether mobile phone radiation is harmful to health, effects for which scientific studies in recent decades have not found evidence, which does not prevent the issue from resurfacing cyclically. . The last episode is that of the analyzes that revealed that the emissions of the iPhone 12 were higher than the authorized maximum. But even in this case the problem (already solved by Apple) did not pose health problems.
This controversy is reminiscent of others such as the one that took place in some countries on the occasion of the arrival of electric light to homes. Electricity was destined to replace gas as a method of domestic lighting, but despite its obvious advantages, misgivings were widespread. Benjamin Harrison, the first US president to have electricity in the White House, refused to touch the switches, and in the United Kingdom the fear of explosions was so common that until the 1940s there were homes that continued with gas light, a system, by the way, much more dangerous.
On the other hand, other times just the opposite has happened, that is, technological innovations that are widely spread but have harmful effects. This happened with radioactivity, whose pharmaceutical or cosmetic use spread in the first decades of the last century among thousands of people with catastrophic consequences. The case of the American industrialist Eben Byers is famous, who died after having consumed 1,400 bottles of a miraculous remedy made from radium, the mineral discovered by Marie Curie, in three years.
