When the artifact was packed and ready, the archaeologists and soldiers carried it down the narrow jungle trail, a person at each corner, mimicking the litter technique used by Howard Carter at King Tut’s tomb. The two artifacts, the jar and the were-jaguar metate, were stored aboard a helicopter.
Though I had anticipated a slightly longer stay, as I watched these activities I was suddenly told my ticket out of the jungle was the third helicopter, departing within the minute. Once again I had to seize my pack and scramble out of T1 in a hurry, with little time to wax sentimental. Soon we were aloft, sweeping above the treetops, heading for Catacamas. It would be my last visit to the valley.
When we arrived at the airstrip, everything was set up for an important national ceremony. A tent was pitched behind the lab, with chairs, loudspeakers, wide-screen televisions, and food. The informality of the jungle vanished in a sea of military officers, dignitaries, ministers, and press. With pomp and fanfare the crates were taken out of the helicopters and carried down the tarmac, parade-style, between lines of Honduran press and distinguished guests. As a flat-panel screen played a stirring video, Chris and an assistant, wearing latex gloves, unpacked the two artifacts and arranged them in museum cases on the stage, specially built to receive them. The were-jaguar metate sat on one side and the vulture jar on the other. When they were fixed in their cases and the glass tops put back on, the audience applauded the artifacts.
Chris gave a short speech, talking about how important it was to preserve the site and the surrounding rainforest and warning about the grave threat of the encroaching clear-cutting. “For the first time,” he told the audience, “we are able to study this culture systematically.”
President Hernández then gave a brief but moving speech, and his words took on an almost religious feeling. “God has blessed us to be alive in this moment so special in the history of Honduras,” he said, adding that everyone assembled there had “great expectations of what this will mean for Honduras and the world.” The discovery of T1, he said, was important beyond the benefit to archaeology. He outlined a vision of what it meant to Hondurans: Not only would it encourage tourism and help train a new generation of Honduran archaeologists; it also spoke to the very identity of the country and its people. Later he would build a special room in the presidential palace to display some of the artifacts.
Honduras is a spectacularly interesting country, whose people have a bifurcating history that goes back to both the Old World and the New. While the Spanish history of Honduras is well known, its pre-Columbian history (beyond Copán) is still an enigma. People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future. That is why the legend of the White City runs so deep in the Honduran national psyche: It’s a direct connection to a pre-Columbian past that was rich, complex, and worthy of remembrance. Five hundred years ago, the survivors of the catastrophe at T1 who walked out the city did not just disappear. Most of them lived on, and their descendants are still part of the vibrant mestizo culture of Honduras today.
Hernández closed out his speech with one final, dramatic proclamation. The city in T1 would henceforth be given a real name: La Ciudad del Jaguar, the City of the Jaguar.
CHAPTER 27
We became orphans, oh my sons!
When humans first walked into the Americas over the Bering Land Bridge fifteen to twenty thousand years ago,* our species existed everywhere as small, wandering bands of hunter-gatherers. There were no cities, no towns, no farming or animal husbandry. We were spread out and moving all the time, only rarely encountering other groups. The low population densities prevented most potential diseases from gaining a foothold. People suffered from parasites and infections, but they did not get most of the diseases so familiar in recent human history—measles, chicken pox, colds, the flu, smallpox, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and bubonic plague, to name only a few.
In the last ten thousand years, as human population densities increased, disease moved into center stage of human affairs. Pandemics changed the very arc of human history. Despite our dazzling technology, we are still very much at the mercy of pathogens, old and new.
In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in only one direction?* The answer lies in how the lives of Old World and New World people diverged after that cross-continental migration more than fifteen thousand years ago.
Farming, which allowed people to settle into towns and villages, was independently invented in both the Old World and the New. The key difference was in animal husbandry. In the Old World, a great variety of animals were domesticated, starting with cattle about eight to ten thousand years ago and quickly moving on to pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, and sheep. New World farmers domesticated animals as well, notably llamas, guinea pigs, dogs, and turkeys. But in Europe (and Asia and Africa), the raising and breeding of livestock became a central aspect of life, an essential activity in almost every household. For thousands of years, Europeans lived in close quarters with their livestock and were continuously exposed to their microbes and diseases. In the New World, perhaps because they had more space and fewer domesticated animals, people did not live cheek by fowl with their animals.
Humans do not usually catch infectious diseases from animals; pathogens tend to confine their nasty work to a single species or genus. (Leishmaniasis is a striking exception.) But microbes mutate all the time. Once in a while, an animal pathogen will change in such a way that it suddenly infects a person. When people in the Near East first domesticated cattle from a type of wild ox called an aurochs, a mutation in the cowpox virus allowed it to jump into humans—and smallpox was born. Rinderpest in cattle migrated to people and became measles. Tuberculosis probably originated in cattle, influenza in birds and pigs, whooping cough in pigs or dogs, and malaria in chickens and ducks. The same process goes on today: Ebola probably jumped to humans from bats, while HIV crashed into our species from monkeys and chimpanzees.
Alongside the domestication of animals, humans in the Old World began settling down in villages, towns, and cities. People lived together in much denser numbers than before. Cities, with their bustle, trade, filth, and close quarters, created a marvelous home for pathogens and an ideal staging ground for epidemics. So when diseases migrated from livestock to people, epidemics broke out. Those diseases found plenty of human fuel, racing from town to town and country to country and even crossing the oceans on board ships. Biologists call these “crowd diseases” because that’s exactly what they need to propagate and evolve.
Epidemics periodically swept through European settlements, killing the susceptible and sparing the robust, culling the gene pool. As always, children were the majority of the victims. Almost no disease is 100 percent fatal: Some victims always survive. The survivors tended to have genes that helped them resist the disease a little better, and they passed that resistance on to their children. Over thousands of years and countless deaths, people in the Old World gradually built up a genetic resistance to many brutal epidemic diseases.
In the New World, on the other hand, no big-time diseases seem to have leapt from animals into the human population. While the Americas had cities as large as those in Europe, those cities were much newer at the time the Spanish arrived. People in the New World hadn’t been living in close quarters long enough for crowd diseases to spring up and propagate. Native Americans never had the opportunity to develop resistance to the myriad diseases that plagued Europeans.
This genetic resistance, by the way, should not be confused with acquired immunity. Acquired immunity is when a body gets rid of a pathogen and afterward maintains a state of high alert for that same microbe. It’s why people don’t normally get the same illness twice. Genetic resistance is something deeper and more mysterious. It is not acquired through exposure—you are born with it. Some people are born with
greater resistance to certain diseases than others. The experience of our team in the valley of T1 is a textbook illustration. The doctors believe everyone on the expedition was bitten and exposed. Only half, however, came down with the disease. A few, like Juan Carlos, were able to fight it off without drugs. Others became seriously ill and some, even as I write this, are still struggling with the disease.
The genes that resist disease can only spread in a population through the pitiless lottery of natural selection. People with weaker immune systems (children especially) must die, while the stronger live, in order for a population to gain widespread resistance. A staggering amount of suffering and death over thousands of years went into building European (and African and Asian) resistance to crowd diseases. One biologist told me that what probably saved many indigenous Indian cultures from complete extinction were the mass rapes of native women by European men; many of the babies from those rapes inherited European genetic resistance to disease. (The scientist, after telling me this horrifying theory, said, “For God’s sake don’t attach my name to that idea.”)
In the New World, these many thousands of years of anguish and death were compressed into a window from 1494 to around 1650. The mass murder by pathogen happened in that one cruel century and a half, and it struck at precisely the worst moment, when the population of the New World had recently coalesced into big cities and reached the levels of density necessary for those epidemics to spread furiously. It was a perfect storm of infection.
We do not hear many of the voices of these victims. Only a handful of Native American eyewitness accounts of the cataclysm survive. One in particular stands out, a remarkable text called the Annals of the Cakchiquels, which describes an epidemic, probably smallpox or flu, that swept an area in Guatemala northwest of Mosquitia. This extraordinary manuscript, discovered in a remote convent in 1844, was written in a Mayan language called Cakchiquel by an Indian named Francisco Hernández Arana Xajilá. As a teenager, Arana Xajilá lived through the epidemic that destroyed his people.
It happened that during the twenty-fifth year [1520] the plague began, oh my sons! First they became ill of a cough, they suffered from nosebleeds and illness of the bladder. It was truly terrible, the number of dead there were in that period. The prince Vakaki Ahmak died then. Little by little heavy shadows and black night enveloped our fathers and grandfathers and us also, oh my sons!… Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and the vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible… So it was that we became orphans, oh my sons! So we became when we were young. All of us were thus. We were born to die!
I would ask the reader to pause for a moment and ponder the statistics. Statistics are mere numbers; they need to be translated into human experience. What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to the survivors and their society? The Black Death in Europe at its worst carried off 30 to 60 percent of the population. That was devastating enough. But the mortality rate wasn’t high enough to destroy European civilization. A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.
The overall mortality rate in this wave of epidemics was indeed about 90 percent. To put that statistic into personal terms, make a list of the nineteen people closest to you: All but one will die. (This of course counts you also as a survivor.) Think what it would be like for you, as it was for the author of the Cakchiquel manuscript, to watch all these people die—your children, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, your friends, your community leaders and spiritual authorities. What would it do to you to see them perish in the most agonizing, humiliating, and terrifying ways possible? Imagine the breakdown of every pillar of your society; imagine the wasteland left behind, the towns and cities abandoned, the fields overgrown, the houses and streets strewn with the unburied dead; imagine the wealth rendered worthless, the stench, the flies, the scavenging animals, the loneliness and silence. Enlarge this scenario beyond towns and cities; enlarge it beyond kingdoms and civilizations; enlarge it beyond even continents—until it embraces half the planet. This inferno of contagion destroyed thousands of societies and millions of people, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from California to New England, from the Amazon rainforest to the tundra of Hudson Bay. It is what destroyed T1, the City of the Jaguar, and the ancient people of Mosquitia.
This is the sort of thing that writers of postapocalyptic fiction put themselves to imagining, the stuff of our greatest news-cycle nightmares—but this very real Armageddon lies beyond reach of the darkest Hollywood movie fantasies. It was the greatest catastrophe ever to befall the human species.
Should sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans be blamed? If one can blame the dead at all, they are answerable. The Spanish, English, and others contributed mightily to the death toll through cruelty, slavery, rape, abuse, starvation, war, and genocide. Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infected blankets. And millions more Indians died of disease who might have survived, had European brutality not left them weakened and susceptible.
It is tempting to argue that if Europeans hadn’t arrived in the New World, these deadly pandemics would not have happened. But the meeting of the Old World and the New was inevitable. If Europeans hadn’t carried disease to the New World, Asians or Africans would have; or New World mariners would have eventually reached the Old. No matter what, disaster would have ensued. This was a monstrous geographic accident waiting to happen. This was a time bomb that had been ticking for fifteen thousand years—counting down to that fateful moment when a ship with sick passengers finally set sail across the wide ocean.
This is in no way an apologia for genocide. Still, the catastrophe was largely a natural event, a mindless biological imperative, a vast migration of dumb pathogens from one side of the planet to the other.
There is much irony in the story of our own disease. The strain of leishmaniasis that befell us is a rare example of a New World disease attacking (mostly) Old World people. While I obviously don’t believe in curses, there is an inescapable sense of commination in the fact that a New World city destroyed by Old World disease wreaked havoc on its Old World rediscoverers with a New World disease. But this irony misses the modern lesson: This was a Third World disease attacking First World people. The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads into the First. This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth. Pathogens have no boundaries; they are the ultimate travelers; they go wherever there’s human fuel. We First Worlders have become far too complacent in the idea that disease, especially NTDs, can be quarantined to the Third World, and that we can live safely in our communities supposedly gated against pathogens, ignoring the suffering of the poor and sick in faraway lands.
The HIV medical crisis has already pushed leishmaniasis into new areas of the globe, especially southern Europe. HIV vastly increases the destructive power of leish and vice versa. A leishmania/HIV coinfection is a terrible combination, considered to be a “new” disease all of its own, almost impossible to treat and usually fatal. HIV and leishmania become locked in a vicious cycle of mutual reinforcement. If a person with leishmaniasis gets HIV, the leish accelerates the onset of full-blown AIDS while blocking the effectiveness of anti-HIV drugs. The reverse is also true: A person with HIV who lives where there’s leishmaniasis is a hundred to a thousand times more likely than a healthy person to get the disease, due to a weakened immune system. People suffering
from a leish/HIV coinfection are so teeming with the parasite that they become super-hosts, potent reservoirs accelerating its spread. And visceral leish, like HIV, has been shown to be transmitted by dirty needles among IV drug users; two studies in the late nineties found leish parasites on some 50 percent of dirty needles discarded by drug users in Madrid at two different locations several years apart. Sixty-eight percent of all visceral leishmaniasis cases in Spain were among IV drug users.
Leishmaniasis is a disease that thrives among the detritus of human misery and neglect: ramshackle housing, rats, overcrowded slums, garbage dumps, open sewers, feral dogs, malnutrition, addiction, lack of health care, poverty, war, and terrorism. Cutaneous leish is now running rampant in the areas of Iraq and Syria controlled by ISIS—so much so that families there are choosing to intentionally inoculate their young girls with leishmaniasis on a covered part of their body so that they will not get it on their faces, where it will leave a scar. (This type of leish is a mild variety that usually goes away on its own, leaving the person immune.)
Since 1993, the leishmania parasite has been spreading, not just because of HIV coinfection but also as people move from rural areas into cities. It is attacking people who venture into the rainforest for projects such as dam and road building, logging, and drug smuggling, as well as adventure tourism, photography, journalism, and archaeology. Strange tales abound. Almost everyone on a Costa Rican jungle yoga adventure was struck down by leish. A survival show contestant lost part of his ear to leish. A team of filmmakers shooting an adventure tourist video were stricken with leish.
The Lost City of the Monkey God Page 27
