The end is nigh! At least in fiction and popular culture. The end of the world has been a popular subject since long before John of Patmos had his revelation, and it will continue to be one long after the last walker has rotted away on The Walking Dead.
The fun part is usually the postapocalyptic setting. As those of us who grew up in the 1980s know, there is a basic default apocalypse: Everything got blown up, now everyone wears leather, rides around on motorcycles in search of more gas, and chrome-plated boomerangs are all the rage.
Real apocalypses are surprisingly common.
Just look into the history of what is known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Empires and powerful kingdoms in what is now Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Syria all collapsed over about 50 years between 1206 and 1150 BCE.
A significant number of cities were destroyed, and some, like Troy, were finished off so thoroughly they never recovered.
Literacy dropped, trade ended, and small villages replaced palaces. No one really knows what caused it.
Similar mysterious collapses have hit the ancient Mayan civilization, and the Indus Valley civilization.
All of these events left plenty of people, but reduced social complexity and left temples or cities vacant and weed-choked.
We definitely know what caused a number of more recent population declines.
In the early 540s, the Plague of Justinian spread across the world, killing between 30 and 50 million people, up to half the world's population at the time. Caused by the bubonic plague, a different strain came back 800 years later and caused the Black Death, which killed about 50 million people just in Europe, somewhere between half and a third of the region's population.
Starting in 1492, European and Asian diseases were introduced to North and South America, and by some estimates 90 per cent of the indigenous people died over the next several hundred years.
For the people left behind in the wake of a plague, the landscape becomes surreal. Deserted villages dot the countryside, as survivors in hard-hit areas flee to nearby communities.
War can also cause an apocalypse. Like the Black Death, the Thirty Years War in the 1600s killed millions, but certain areas in Germany were completely depopulated.
The An Lushan Rebellion in the 700s in China raged for almost a decade and may have killed up to 15 per cent of the world's population.
Timur, the Central Asian warlord of the late 1300s, made literal mountains of skulls in conquered territories.
This is leaving out modern atrocities such as the Holocaust and genocides in Rwanda, Armenia, and Cambodia.
Some apocalypses are more abstract. The Basques speak a language that has no relatives in Europe or anywhere else. One theory about this cause is that they are the last culture to preserve a language from before Indo-European tongues came from the east and split into everything from Latin to Gaelic to English.
We have no idea what happened to isolate the Basque language. Conquest? Slow cultural assimilation of their neighbours? It's a lost story, about a lost world.
The main thing you realize by looking at the end of the world is that it's never the end. People survive (mostly - maybe not the Vikings in Greenland) and move on, or rebuild.
They deal with depression, both economic and psychological.
And then for the next generation, the end of the world is the new normal. And that normal is ready to be upended again by the next apocalypse.
Matthew Claxton is a reporter at the Langley Advance.
