Global connectedness is not a new thing. For one example, the best currently available bioarcheological data indicate that the second plague pandemic—the spread of bubonic and pneumonic plague caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, the first phase of which was the “Black Death”—entered Europe via what is now southwestern Russia and the Crimea and spread in seven years (1346-1353) through virtually all of Western Europe, along well-established overland and seaborne trade and communication routes.