Could Humanity Return to the Dark Ages? | Unveiled

Could Humanity Return to the Dark Ages?

In the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire collapsed, leaving huge parts of Europe and northern Africa in disarray. Humanity forged on, but surviving records from these areas for almost the next thousand years are few and far between, leaving them shrouded in relative mystery. This period of time is known as the “Dark Ages”.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: Could humanity return to the Dark Ages?

Many historians don’t actually like the term “Dark Ages”, arguing that it’s inaccurate and came about because of bias in favour of Ancient Rome. The term was initially coined by Italian scholar Petrarch in the early 14th century, right at the close of what we might call the “Dark Ages”; but the time period it refers to has changed a lot since then. The Dark Ages are “dark” not because human society was destroyed, but because many records from this period are lost. In Europe, there is relatively little literature to teach us about what happened and who was important, and tragic events have depleted our resources even further. In England, the fire of Ashburnham House in 1731 damaged many valuable manuscripts from this period, including a rare copy of the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”, a history of the Anglo-Saxons. The “Beowulf” manuscript was burnt but survived the fire and remains one of the most important literary texts in history.

Because we don’t really know much about what happened in this period, it’s easy to misrepresent it as a time when humanity stopped writing things down, stopped creating art, stopped trying to build societies, and so on. It doesn’t help that the Vikings spent several centuries invading other countries and burning down towns. But it’s also worth noting that the Dark Ages only really happened in Europe and places that were once part of the Roman Empire – most of Asia and Africa, as well as the Americas, wasn’t affected by the fall of Rome, and have records of their own from this period.

But regardless, the Dark Ages were still a very different era to the modern one, a time when disease was rife, serfdom and slavery were widespread, and social structure was much more rigid. It was also well before the advent of electric power and modern medicine. Could we ever return to this point, and revert back to a pre-industrial state? It makes the most sense to assume that some sort of cataclysm would have to take place, something capable of wiping out our infrastructure and technology on a global scale. On the other hand, many people crave a simpler life away from modern comforts and choose to live “off-the-grid”. These people are arguably living in a dark age of their own, and many of them enjoy living this way.

If we did revert, however, the biggest problem facing us would be disease. The bubonic plague wrought havoc on large parts of the world, and the Black Death in the 14th century remains one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. Estimates suggest it reduced the world’s population by 100 million or more, around a fifth of the total population at the time. Today, we have relatively effective antibiotics to treat the disease, but horrifyingly it has not been eradicated. In fact, in the US there’s an average of seven cases reported per year. Worse, modern antibiotics are steadily losing their effectiveness, and since the plague isn’t gone, if we stop being able to treat it we could face catastrophe. A widespread failure of antibiotics could perhaps even CAUSE a return to pre-industrialization. Along with the plague, we’d lose our ability to treat all sorts of other diseases. Even today, the flu is often deadly, and without flu jabs it would get even worse; similarly, we wouldn’t be able to diagnose or treat complex diseases like cancer. Basic medical procedures – getting a rotten tooth removed, for instance – would be extremely painful, with no anaesthetic other than alcohol. They’d also be very dangerous, with no good way to sterilise instruments or fight off a potential infection. We might go back to using leeches and bloodletting in a desperate bid to cure common ailments.

Something else we’d lose access to in the event of a new Dark Age is transportation. We wouldn’t have the electricity or fossil fuels to power cars, buses, trains, planes, and so on. It wasn’t until the 19th century that people began using coal to fuel steam trains. Luckily, we haven’t had these methods of transportation for the vast majority of human history, and there’s one very important tool we wouldn’t lose access to: horses. Horses are still kept and domesticated today, even though most people don’t know how to ride them. Once, it was relatively common to have a horse, and everybody knew what to do with them; in one generation, we could make horse riding widespread again. We would also still have ships to cross bodies of water, so trade, travel and commerce wouldn’t completely halt because we’ve taken a few steps back, they would just slow down. You could still visit all the same places you can visit today, it would just take a LOT longer.

This does mean that the importation of exotic fruits and vegetables wouldn’t be feasible, however. It would still be possible to export fruits from their endemic areas – pineapples became a status symbol of the European elite when brought back from the Americas in the 1400s - but only the rich would be able to obtain them. But while we might have to forego pineapples and bananas, many of the traditional “Dark Age” countries in Europe are perfectly capable of cultivating foods of their own – though these aren’t as exciting. If you went back to the Dark Ages, your diet would largely consist of bread, porridge, and other things you can make out of grain. As far as fruits and veggies are concerned, in northern and western Europe you’d be stuck with apples, cabbages, and lettuce, while Mediterranean countries could enjoy more variety. Greece, Italy and Spain, among others, would be able to produce valuable citrus fruits and grapes to make wine. Meat would still be common, of course, and game meat was more popular then than it was today if you could afford to go out hunting. They had butchers in this era, but fresh meat was expensive – the majority of Medieval peasants had much less meat in their diets than people today. There’s good news for vegans, because almond milk was popular in the Dark Ages as well, and was much better for you than animal milk since this was before the days of pasteurisation.

How long would a new Dark Age last, though? Well, that all depends on one thing: books. You could wipe out our technological infrastructure and the internet with a big enough catastrophe, but it’s impossible to imagine any event destroying all of our books - especially since books are now mass-produced. Even if one, huge library burned to the ground, the knowledge would still exist in other libraries. With access to this knowledge, we wouldn’t be in the Dark Ages for very long, because we’d have access to ready knowledge about diseases, medicine, which foods grow where, and how to mine coal and use it as fuel. We could also learn about the dangers of fossil fuels at the same time, and how they can damage the planet. It could be an opportunity for humanity to learn and avoid making the same mistakes twice, and we could have modernity without pollution or exploitation.

What about violence? Would a new Dark Age be more violent than the modern day? Well, they were certainly full of violent conflicts, with violent invasions and Holy Wars. But, it’s not like violence and war don’t exist today. We also have much more destructive weapons with which to wage them. There’s also the question of class division. Certainly, feudalism isn’t something we want to return to, and it might take some titanic struggles to drag ourselves back out of it. We can only hope that eventually, we would find our way back out of a feudal system. Who knows, maybe people would find some useful guidance in all those surviving books we mentioned - and even improve on what we have now!

We already lived through the actual Dark Ages once, and though we don’t have all the information on what happened, we know our species survived and built the world we live in today. But that doesn’t mean that our way of life is guaranteed. Civilizations have collapsed before, and who knows what the future holds? And that’s why humanity could return to the Dark Ages.