On: Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall...

[pvg]

This is more or less how more recent scholarship looks at complicated, long-term multi-modal sort of events and changes. Fate of Rome is a fairly recent book that examines things like disease and climate change, for instance:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...

[gloryjulio → pvg]

I don't know if that's a new viewpoint. I have been hearing about how the island and frequent disasters shaped Japan for as long as I remember.

[pvg → gloryjulio]

It's definitely newer than Gibbon, in the case of the fall of the Roman empire.