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Message: [QUOTE="Oliver Buckle, post: 300819, member: 12649"] The time line is a bit confused I think. The black death struck in the middle of the 1300's, there was a great shortage of labour after it which lead to a breakdown of the system where peasants were tied to a particular master as masters tried to poach each others labour. Sheep really took off 400 years or so later when it was discovered that grazing sheep on land that had been cropped, rather than trying to crop it again and again, or leaving it fallow for a year, worked much better. That coincided with the first water driven industrial spinning and weaving and thus the start of the industrial revolution. People always used to talk about pestis, black death, arriving from the orient as a new disease, but modern DNA analysis is able to establish that people were dying from it much earlier, as far back as pre Roman times, and that the huge numbers of deaths were caused by a new variant rather than a new disease. I reckon this is why authorities are so concerned about the new variant outbreaks of ebola in the Congo, if it escapes the immediate region it could mean hundreds of millions dead worldwide. [/QUOTE]