There are a lot of recent stories about whole families being wiped out, or one by one people descending into a cellar and succumbing. If you didn't know anything about gases, it seems like supernatural causes would be easiest to ascribe. I've never heard of this outside of modern times, however. Are there any historical accounts of such things?
For reference: https://np.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/5uo176/underground_party_bunker/ddvz4sp/
Oh, yes, people were dying from gases underground before it was properly understood. However, the ancients were pretty smart people in a number of ways. They could see that people could die underground and devised a way to explain it and avoid it. They did this through observation and logic, not through blaming the gods.
The Roman architect Vitruvius, who lived in the 1st Century BC, blamed these deaths on underground gases. He thought it was a wind of some sort seeping up through fissures in the earth, but he had an ingenious solution: lower a lighted lamp into the whole. If it goes out, he says, it is dangerous. Today we know that there was probably a lack of oxygen which extinguished the fire, but Vitruvius believed it was blown out by this dangerous underground wind.
The solution was equally simple: dig additional ventilation shafts. He understood that these dangerous gases needed to be vented somehow, and he knew how to do it.
I’ve copied a relevant quote from him (8.6.12-13) if you’d like to read him explain it in his own words:
But if there are no springs from which we can construct aqueducts, it is necessary to dig wells. Now in the digging of wells we must not disdain reflection, but must devote much acuteness and skill to the consideration of the natural principles of things, because the earth contains many various substances in itself; for like everything else, it is composed of the four elements. In the first place, it is itself earthy, and of moisture it contains springs of water, also heat, which produces sulphur, alum, and asphalt; and finally, it contains great currents of air, which, coming up in a pregnant state through the porous fissures to the places where wells are being dug, and finding men engaged in digging there, stop up the breath of life in their nostrils by the natural strength of the exhalation. So those who do not quickly escape from the spot, are killed there.
To guard against this, we must proceed as follows. Let down a lighted lamp, and if it keeps on burning, a man may make the descent without danger. But if the light is put out by the strength of the exhalation, then dig air shafts beside the well on the right and left. Thus the vapours will be carried off by the air shafts as if through nostrils. When these are finished and we come to the water, then a wall should be built round the well without stopping up the vein.