Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

Early farmers’ livestock and crops were not the only victims of these new pathogens. The farmers were too. Their livestock in particular were fifth columnists who quietly introduced a whole new suite of lethal pathogens to humanity. Currently, zoonotic pathogens (those passed on by animals) account for nearly 60 percent of all human diseases and three-quarters of all emerging diseases. This translates to roughly 2.5 billion cases of human sickness and 2.7 million deaths every year.7 Some of these come from the rats, fleas, and bedbugs that flourish in the dark corners of human settlements, but most come from the domestic animals we depend on for meat, milk, leather, eggs, transport, hunting, and, ironically in the case of cats, pest control. Included among them are a bucketload of gastrointestinal diseases, bacterial pathogens like anthrax and tuberculosis, parasites like toxoplasmosis, and viral pathogens like measles and influenza. And our history of consuming wild animals from pangolins to bats has introduced numerous pathogens to our species, including SARS and SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The difference is that in the deep past when human populations were considerably smaller and widely dispersed, these outbreaks usually died off as soon as they killed their hosts or their hosts developed an immunity to the pathogens.