Posted on 02/15/2004 11:18:28 AM PST by blam
Mesopotamian climate change
Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater to supply their crops. So archaeologists have long wondered why the ancient people moved from an area where they could easily farm to begin a much harder life in the south. “The challenge to us as paleoclimatologists is to develop much more detailed and well-dated records.” -Peter deMenocal, Columbia University
One reason could be climate, said Harvey Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University, at the meeting in December. The climate record in ancient Mesopotamia and around the world shows an abrupt climate change event in 6400 B.C., about 8,200 radiocarbon years before present. A period of immense cooling and drought persisted for the next 200 to 300 years.
When the severe drought and cooling hit the region, there was no longer enough rainwater to sustain the agriculture in the north, Weiss says. And irrigation was not possible due to the topography, so these populations were left with two subsistence alternatives: pastoral nomadism or migration.
Archaeologists first start seeing evidence of settlements in southern Mesopotamia shortly after 6400 B.C. In the south, an area too arid to have sustained rain-fed agriculture, irrigation from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers would have been possible where the rivers flow at plain level, Weiss says. Irrigation farming took three to four times the labor effort of rain-fed farming, but irrigation agriculture would have made surplus production easier because the yield was double that of rain-fed agriculture. Surplus production meant that people could begin specializing in full-time crafts rather than relying exclusively on farming, Weiss says, thus giving rise to the first class-based society and the first cities.
"It's perhaps too extreme to say that climate change caused all of the advanced society collapses," says Peter deMenocal, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "But it's also too extreme to say that climate change has had no effect. The challenge to us as paleoclimatologists is to develop much more detailed and well-dated records," he says.
The most fundamental question in Mesopotamian archaeology, Weiss concludes, "is, 'why is there a Mesopotamian archaeology?'" Having already tied the Early Bronze Age collapses from the Aegean to the Indus to the abrupt climate change event 4,200 years before present, Weiss believes he can now tie the changes of lifestyle and migration that were essential for early class formation and urban life in Mesopotamia to an abrupt, multi-century shift toward drier conditions which occurred near 8,200 years before present.
I've read some speculation that state that the BAsque, the Chechens, the Dravidians and the Ainu were all relted. But it seems mostly speculation to me as the distances and time spans are too great.
Where did you get this information? I have never heard such a thing.
"Before 50 million years ago, Earth had no regular ice ages, but when we did have them they tended to be colossal. A massive freezing occurred abut 2.2 billion years ago, followed by a billion years or so of warmth. Then there was another ice age even larger than the first - so large that some scientists are now referring to the age in which it occurred as the Cryogenian, or super ice age. The condition is more popularly known as Snowball Earth.
" 'Snowball,' however, barely captures the murderousness of conditions. The theory is that because of a fall in solar radiation of about 6 percent and a dropoff in the production (or retention) of greenhouse gases, Earth essentially lost its ability to hold on to its heart. It became a kind of all-over Antarctica. Temperatures plunged by as much as 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire surface of the planet may have frozen solid, with ocean ice up to half a mile thick at higher latitudes and tens of yards thick even in the tropics."
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Yes, the political climate...
As late as 1890 rocks did not fall from the sky, and it didn't matter how many French farmers showed up at the Institute with burnt rocks they picked out of their fields after seeing them fall out of the sky.
Bump for later reading
:') There are some who still don't think it's true. I think the first thaw in that cognitive freeze occurred when a stone fell out of a clear sky as witnessed by the Holy Roman Emperor and his rather large entourage. But resistance to the idea of impact (large, serious ones, striking after the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment) remained until 1994, when the bits of SL-9 smashed into Jupiter. (':
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The climate record in ancient Mesopotamia and around the world shows an abrupt climate change event in 6400 B.C., about 8,200 radiocarbon years before present. A period of immense cooling and drought persisted for the next 200 to 300 years.
14 year old thread.
Yes I’ve been looking for it for ages. Finally found it. Thanks so much.
This topic was posted , thanks blam, ping message update.
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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