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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 26076880, member: 128351&quot;][ATTACH=full]1661007[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Sometimes in history great empires rise and fall, great peoples with former great accomplishments become a bunch of idiots. In 1734 Montesquieu published &quot;<i>Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline</i>&quot;. He accused opulence and luxury, together with the rise of Christianity, of being causes of Rome&#039;s decline.</p><p>Almost three centuries later, a new study, published in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences of the United States</i>, points to the Roman silver coins mass production. Silver was extracted from argentiferous galena but, for 1 kilogram of silver, the process liberated tens of kilograms of lead which contaminated everything including the athmosphere. Ice samples from Groenland show that the lead contents in the atmosphere over Europe soared in the 1st c. BC and later again in the late 2nd c. AD, which inevitably had epidemiological consequences : late Romans likely lost an average 2.5 to 3 points of IQ.</p><p><br /></p><p>The article can be read here : <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419630121" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419630121" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419630121</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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