What if HIV began in ancient times?
- Thread starter Mosshadow
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Potentially it would become a lot less virulent by now, but at its height...well. Everywhere would be like certain parts of Africa.
It would probably end up fairly widespread with a Roman POD. I also suspect that RGB is right and the lethality would likely decrease at some point. Interestingly, nobody would have any idea what they were sick with. The disease works so slowly that associating it with sexual activity would be difficult until at least the Victorian period. And since it enables other diseases to kill you there would be no reason to even suspect it exists.
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Maybe Galen or some other physician could at least figure out there's something wrong. Probably not able to treat it well.
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Give that Roman society was much more sexually indulgent than our present society, it could spread much faster.
Worst case we could have some interesting population bottlenecks happen because of peak mortality events (imagine the Antonine Plague hitting an population where HIV is endemic).
Best case...well. Not sure what the best case is. It's going to be hard to detect because lifespans were so low anyway and the population pyramid would tend young. Could be just a fact of life like various strains of the pox were for centuries and centuries.
Best case...well. Not sure what the best case is. It's going to be hard to detect because lifespans were so low anyway and the population pyramid would tend young. Could be just a fact of life like various strains of the pox were for centuries and centuries.
Once the connection between sex and HIV is discovered, I can see many societies becoming sexually conservative (no affairs) to lessen the chance of contraction and increase their resilience to other plagues. I think HIV in ancient times would result in a substantially lower population than we see IOTL.
Could this have the chance of killing off humanity?
Not only would no one have any idea that it even existed, it can also infect babies born to HIV-positive mothers.
Not only would no one have any idea that it even existed, it can also infect babies born to HIV-positive mothers.
It's not killed off Botswana or Lesotho, so no chance of "killing off", but couple it with plagues and wars and there could be strong bottlenecks from which humanity emerges with way less genetic ancestors
It's not killed off Botswana or Lesotho, so no chance of "killing off", but couple it with plagues and wars and there could be strong bottlenecks from which humanity emerges with way less genetic ancestors
True, but after a few decades, medicine realized what was up and society at large was able to treat it and create education campaigns to slow it down.
None of that is happening in the ancient era.
It's tending towards less virulent in Africa and more in Europe right now. Kind of interesting, because it's only been a few generations. Would the ancient world be able to maintain enough population for a century or two to get past this period?
Well, it's a big speculation without data.
Nowadays most people in the developed world do. However at the start of the AIDS epidemic people died within a matter of weeks or months, simply because there was nothing to stop the disease. Also consider that getting even a minor disease back then was much worse than today, so someone who had HIV and suffered an illness would be far more likely to die.
IDK, it often seems an uphill struggle to try and get people to change their sexual habits even when STDs are a known threat. Viz. modern Africa or the gay community in the 1980s.
Also bear in mind that pretty much every society before the 1950s was "sexually conservative" by modern Western standards. Aside from the threat of other STDs, there was always the risk of unwanted pregnancies.
Well in OTL , a few people were likely HIV positive for decades before it exploded out into the world, thanks to jet planes. Would the roman population density be too small? And , as with previous 'earlier aids' threads, I'm gonna bring up that short story that I don't know the name of or author, but the one where Aids strikes late Victorian England , with Sherlock Holmes and the Jack the Ripper....
It's very unlikely that HIV-1 (note it was a specific variant of HIV-1 that started everything) would make the jump to Humans that early, the reason it did is the result of how Central Africa was in the late 19th and early 20 centuries.
Now, let's say for some reason it manages to, well how exactly is it going to get to the rest of the world, HIV-1 originates in the Congo, which was one of the least contacted parts of the world for millenia? By the time you get to a point of colonialism that far away the virus will likely have evolved to become less mild and thus while a problem, would not be the major lethal epidemic it is in the modern world.
Now, let's say for some reason it manages to, well how exactly is it going to get to the rest of the world, HIV-1 originates in the Congo, which was one of the least contacted parts of the world for millenia? By the time you get to a point of colonialism that far away the virus will likely have evolved to become less mild and thus while a problem, would not be the major lethal epidemic it is in the modern world.
Let me rephrase that. Given the lack of adequate medicine to treat the disease and the nature of making a population much more susceptible to infectious diseases and the fact that plagues were much more common in Antiquity than they are today, a population dealing with HIV would have no choice in the matter. They'd have to be more sexually conservative by virtue of necessity. They'd either do whatever they can to slow the spread of the disease or the mortality rates might become horrific, especially given that infected mothers can pass on HIV to their children. Infant mortality would be even higher than it was IOTL.
I did bring up underdeveloped countries for a reason. A large proportion of the affected demographic is undiagnosed, untreated, and yet leaving many descendants, with booming populations and youthful age pyramids. So in the ancient world starvation would probably kill far more than HIV would, as would all sorts of preventable diseases, even in non-immune-compromised people.
(Undiagnosed and untreated and in the population pool is also how HIV still gets spread today in say, the gay community in the developed world; it's people who have contracted it but have no visible outward signs. They aren't getting treatment, because they aren't getting AIDS, not the other way around.)
It would be hard to spread out of central to southern Africa. People didn't move much outside of armies and traders and the area of Africa where HIV might develop earlier didn't have a great deal of either connecting them to the Roman Empire. Sure, there were some traders that moved around these parts, but nothing on the scale of modern times.
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