I thought by now, I’d own a flying car. I thought, by now, we’d all be 3D printing useful household items: scrub brushes and furnace filters and replacement kidneys. But something keeps happening to the human race that sets back progress a century at a time: something that keeps us revisiting our brutish neanderthal roots, the dream of being an ambassador for Starfleet growing more and more distant.
I think I may know the answer to this mystery. It’s the one item on the periodic table we just can’t quit, no matter how often we burn our hands on the stove of consequences: Pb. Lead. Moron’s Gold.
Recently you may have run across articles claiming levels of lead in Brotein Powders that exceed safety guidelines, especially for those who have a daily dose. (insert shocked face here) Would it be the dumbest thing humans did in pursuit of macros and gains? Who knows, but that is part of Lead’s rich tradition. After first checking to make sure my brand was clear (it was), I ventured down a rabbit hole of human lead poisoning.
Lead: the Lesson We Forget to Learn (over and over)
The Romans, brilliant engineers that they were, decided sometime around the 1st century BCE that lead was the perfect material for just about everything—pipes, cups, utensils, you name it—effectively turning daily life into a slow-drip toxic experiment. Their plumbing and tableware delivered not just water and wine but also a generous side of neurological chaos and reproductive woes, hitting the elite especially hard (because of course the rich always get more of the good stuff).
While historians still bicker over whether lead poisoning helped topple the empire or was merely an unpleasant subplot in Rome’s long decline, the evidence in ancient bones suggests Romans were marinating in the stuff. The details may still be under research, but one thing’s clear: for a civilization that gave us roads and aqueducts, they really whiffed it on basic public health.
Vikings heated wine (acidic) in pewter cups, smelted metals, and traded avidly for non-native goods painted and dyed with pigments made with lead. Excavated remains show widespread lead distribution. One wonders if the Beserker lifestyle was assisted by a little soupcon of lead in their cups of mead.
Their lower-class pals, safely swigging ale from bone or wood cups, didn’t even know how good they had it.
Lead doesn’t play favorites. Plenty of women in history have fallen victim as well, specifically Elizabeth the I. It is believed that she poisoned herself with lead (and mercury) by applying a foundation of white lead and vinegar, mercury-soaked wigs and lip stain made from cinnabar.
As we hit the Age of Industry, our manufacturing processes ensured everyone, old, young, rich, or poor, got a heaping helping of lead. Progress! It brings to mind the Franklin Expedition, who were originally thought to have died from lead poisoning (canned foods) but the heavy distribution in their bones indicated that they were soaked in lead before even setting foot on board from other environmental factors.
Imagine if we had avoided the developmental delays, impulsiveness, self-destructive behaviors, and general madness from lead poisoning, where we might be today.
By Any Other Name
Fun fact, chronic lead poisoning has been called Saturnism, Painters Madness, Plumbism, Devon Colic and Dry Gripes. It’s also known to cause infertility, stillbirths, optic nerve damage, moody behaviors, mental incompetence, psychotic episodes (think Caligula, Nero and Commodus). Bone and tooth enamel analysis has verified Handel, Goya, Van Gogh, Beethoven and Mad King George were likely poisoned by high levels of lead.
Lead didn’t just plague our distant ancestors. As recent as the late 20th century, we were blanketing the world with lead paint, leaded gasoline, littering the forests and abandoning strip mines to leach lead into ground water.
Pick up Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers and see how she maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. Specifically, “lead and arsenic poisoned plume from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma.”
Fraser makes a convincing case that it wasn’t just bad luck that churned out a factory-line of mega-monsters like Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and their ilk. Instead, she revives the controversial “lead-crime hypothesis,” suggesting that massive industrial pollution – arsenic, lead, smelter fumes, toxic sludge — poisoned not only rivers and air, but possibly a generation of troubled minds.
Get the Lead Out
In the end, maybe it’s not that humanity lacks brilliance—we just keep dosing ourselves with the cognitive equivalent of a brick to the skull. Lead has been our silent co-pilot from Rome to Ragnarök to the Pacific Northwest, guiding us gently but firmly away from enlightenment and straight into chaos. And if history has a thesis, it might be this: we’re not slow learners; we’re just chronically poisoned. We need a “moon shot” to eradicate lead and mitigate its ravages. Until we finally quit our millennia-long toxic relationship with Pb, we’ll keep asking why progress moves at a crawl while the answer is, and always has been, lodged in our very bones.
