On a shining late spring day more than twelve thousand years ago, a small group of warmly dressed humans made their way along an icy ridge in what is now British Columbia, North America.
They were armed for the hunt. The lead members of the stalking party held their spears at the ready as they picked their way forward, patrolling for antelope, musk ox, or deer. The three hunters in the rear held lightly sheathed stone knives and kept a careful lookout for predators who might be stalking them.
They’d left home that morning, heading to the nearby ridgeline where a family of antelope had been spied. They hoped to bring down enough meat for their little clan of seventeen souls.
The day was glorious. Shimmering veils of snow danced up to sweep across the ridge, pierced with glittering light from the pure cerulean sky. The hunters knew the territory well, and though the terrain across which they were stalking was an ancient glacier, their mental maps included every ice fall, submerged river, and sudden drop.
The plan was simple. Bag an antelope – or two, or three – butcher on the spot, have a meal, camp for the night, and return home in the morning. They had been hunting this ridge of the glacier since arriving in the home valley a decade before. Life here was rich. Summers were warm enough to find honey and eggs, fish, frogs, small plump birds, and creamy grubs, alongside fields of delicate grass seed and plenty of berries to dry.
The band even had enough surplus to trade. Just a few days before, a small group of envoys from another clan had appeared outside camp with stone axes to barter. These they traded for dried berries and a side of smoked salmon – “extra” now that spring was almost here, and enough for the outsiders to tide themselves over until the melt began.
But the hunt was not to be successful. As the sun crossed the sky toward midday, one of the hunters in the lead felt a strong cramping in his gut. He ignored the rumbling for a time, until the pain became intense enough that he called a halt, put down his spear, and held an inquiring hand to his abdomen.
Then he abruptly threw up. The vomit was sticky and dark, with flecks like sand.
Startled, everyone drew back. The lead hunter vomited again. And again.
They stopped to rest. By now, the lead hunter was shivering uncontrollably, and strange dark markings had appeared on his cheeks and the backs of his hands.
They built a fire to heat water and brew tea. Nothing stayed down – not tea, not pemmican, not a few precious nutmeats.
By nightfall, all but one of the group was sick. The lead hunter had revived a bit, however, and resolved to go back to the valley, despite the hour. He would not be dissuaded, and so, alone, in the very dark of the night, he took a torch from the fire and with that and the dewy light of the stars, began making his way home.
Less than a mile from his hut, he stumbled. By now, his stomach and small intestines were a mass of bleeding lesions, and he could no longer contain his bowels. When he died, stumbling forward with a cry as the torch flew from his hands, he skittered down a small slope into an icy crevasse. Not deep, but small and hidden, far enough off the path that his people would never find him.
The rest of the band who were also sick died in the night. The lone survivor, stunned with sorrow and shock, walked into the home enclosure the next afternoon with eyes that had seen the souls of his ancestors. He gestured vaguely back to where the bodies lay, but no one dared venture to them.
This caution was commendable, but it did nothing to save them. Over the next ten days, in successive small waves of death, the entire band perished. All died in stabbing pain, vomiting blood and begging the forebears for their release.
Nature is nothing if not tidy. Presently, a family of bears wandered into the enclosure to feast on the bodies. Mountain cats and wolves had their share. Vultures and corvids gobbled the smaller bits, and beetles feasted on the rest. By high summer, there was no trace that the clan had ever lived in the valley. The frames of their huts were blown to bits by wind and rain, and the roof skins hauled away by lions.
As for the hunter who was first to die? His body lay unseen, wedged tightly in the crevasse. It was quickly buried by a freak late spring blizzard, and so, as winters passed and the snows blew in, he was entombed in the glacier, together with the virus that had killed him.
They were both waiting to be found.
That’s a fanciful bit of fiction. It never happened, so far as I know, although something like it might have.
We do know how a lot of prehistoric people died. We know how “Otzi the Iceman” died: with an arrow in his back.
And we also know that humans have long been felled by viruses and bacteria that cause terminal disease. Some viruses are so virulent that they burn themselves out, killing their hosts too efficiently. Others bed down within a population, evolving at the margins and staying endemic within a populace.
Imagine if the virus that killed our intrepid hunters had been one of the former. It seems to have been, as it killed everyone in the band within ten days.
The virus was likely brought by the man and the woman who came to barter stone axes. Or it could have come from one of the birds the band had feasted on that night with their visitors, some of the tasty little morsels unfamiliar to them, and obviously from far away. There would be no way to know.
What we do know is that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Glaciers are melting. Permafrost is thawing. Viruses and bacteria have been discovered emerging from their icy tombs still viable after 10 and 20 thousand years.
There is a potential scenario that brings a modern group of hunters – scientists hunting ice cores or looking for endangered species in the mountains of BC – to stumble across the body of our hunter in his glacial grave. As they bend down in wonder over the torso melting out of the ice, they will be the first humans since he died to have encountered the deadly virus that killed him.
Will they hike back to their base camp and potentially infect the thirty people also working there? Will some of those people leave camp over the next day or so and return to their families? Will a number of them wake in the darkness to convulsive abdominal cramps and vomiting? Will the viral pandemic blaze through a modern population as it did through our tiny band of gatherer-hunters in late-Paleolithic Canada?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is much more likely that if we do awaken ancient infectious agents, they will not be transmitted far, or will be less virulent than my speculative Ebola-like virus above.
There are far more sweeping, far-reaching, and immediately dire sequelae of climate change to worry about, in any event.
- Sea level rise.
- Food crop disruption.
- Continent-wide wildfires.
- Battering ram hurricanes.
- Desperate climate refugees.
But the case of frozen Lazarus microbes arising from their icy crypts is just something else that we don’t know enough about and should be trying to prepare for.
This is yet another thing that absolutely could happen. And we’re not prepared.
We weren’t prepared for COVID. We botched it spectacularly.
We’re not prepared for climate change, either. And so far, we are also botching it spectacularly.
We need to step up our game. That’s all I’m saying. If DC and the Democratic administration can’t or won’t do enough, we must force their hand. There isn’t any other option. And there is barely enough remaining time.
Take action, if you can (a few suggestions here)
Climate Generation
Common Cause’s “find your representative” tool
350.org
Extinction Rebellion
Oxfam
As always, thanks so much for reading and taking the time to comment.
-KïraThomsen-Cheek
@KiraOnClimate
kirathomsencheek@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/HairOnFirePeople/