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Humans possess limited knowledge on what generated cultural dynamics to strengthen human resilience to overcome climate-induced stresses. Although the highly developed mental ability of humans could have enabled significant human resilience in history, no study has empirically explained or has even scientifically confirmed how and when such dynamics arose. To fill the current research gap, this study therefore explores the associations among climatic conditions, the evolutional dynamics of human thinkers and their thoughts, and human ecological-socioeconomic conditions in the past 2500 years in Europe. Results from quantitative modellings and causal analyses confirm that climatic-ecological stresses led to human ecological-socioeconomic crises, and thereby dramatically increased twice of the thinkers' number and their thoughts' impact across different philosophies in truth, knowledge, and ethics for adaptation at multi-decadal to centennial temporal scales, especially in spirituality oriented mentality. The process of the stress-generated cultural dynamics displays some similarities with the stress-induced mutagenesis in organism evolution. Ultimately, climatic-ecological stresses prompt the escalation in the number of thinkers and impacts of their thoughts and flourishing of philosophy. Such stress-regenerated cultural dynamics imply that the current climate change threat may stimulate another thriving phase of cultural selection and lift humans to the next homeostatic plateau of civilization. Findings also extend the cognate scope of psychological, sociological, and civilization studies., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no competing financial interests., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Plague synchronously swept across separated regions in Europe throughout history. However, the spatio-temporal synchrony of plague and its driving mechanism have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we transformed the historical European plague database spanned 1347-1800 CE into country-level time-series that differentiated large-scale plague outbreak from counted data. We found that there are 74 years in which two or more countries in our study region (UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) experienced large-scale plague outbreak in the same year. Our Multivariate Ripley's K-function results showed that the onset year and the cessation year of large-scale plague outbreak are synchronized at the 0-23-year and 0-20-year windows, respectively. The temporal association between such synchrony and climatic forcing was further investigated using the Superposed Epoch Analysis, and drought was found to be responsible for the synchrony. Integrating our results with a literature survey, we suggested that prior to the peak of plague, the occurrence of drought and the subsequent reintroduced rainfall dampened both the rodent community and human society and boosted the number of fleas that carried plague. Such a synthesis facilitated the outbreak of plague. At the same time, high temperature associated with such drought also confined the geographic diffusion of the plague. Hence, although continental mega-drought could initiate the synchrony of plague outbreak, the synchrony actually consisted of a number of localized plague outbreak events scattering across different regions in Europe. According to the projected rising trend of drought in terms of its magnitude, duration, and geographic extent, the risk of synchrony of rodent-borne diseases in Europe will be significantly elevated, especially in France, Italy, and Spain., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Numerous historical works have mentioned that trade routes were to blame for the spread of plague in European history, yet this relationship has never been tested by quantitative evidence. Here, we resolve the hypothetical role of trade routes through statistical analysis on the geo-referenced major trade routes in the early modern period and the 6,656 geo-referenced plague outbreak records in AD1347-1760. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation results show that major trade routes played a dominant role in spreading plague in pre-industrial Europe. Furthermore, the negative correlation between plague outbreaks and their distance from major trade ports indicates the absence of a permanent plague focus in the inland areas of Europe. Major trade routes decided the major plague outbreak hotspots, while navigable rivers determined the geographic pattern of sporadic plague cases. A case study in Germany indicates that plague penetrated further into Europe through the local trade route network. Based on our findings, we propose the mechanism of plague transmission in historical Europe, which is imperative in demonstrating how pandemics were spread in recent human history.