There’s a lot in our lives today that traces back to ancient Greece and the other cultures of the Aegean: our politics and philosophy, our art and architecture, and, apparently, our lead pollution. That’s according to a study of sediment cores from in and around the Aegean Sea, which found the earliest-known evidence of human-caused contamination from lead, and tied it to the area’s inhabitants around 5,200 years ago.
Published in Communications Earth & Environment, the study also identified an increase in lead contamination around 2,150 years ago. This coincided with a significant socioeconomic shift in the Aegean, as the ancient Greeks came under the control of the Romans and increased their output of silver as a result.
“Because lead was released during the production of silver, […] proof of increasing lead concentrations in the environment is […] an important indicator of socioeconomic change,” said Andreas Koutsodendris, a study author and a researcher at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University, according to a press release.
