Climate change forged first civilizations: scientist

[malkin767]

The earliest civilizations were not a product of favorable conditions but rather a last resort in the face of dramatic shifts in the weather, a climate scientist said on Thursday

Comments

[el_j]

Is there going to be a paper? My "Emergence of Old World Civilizations" class just started yesterday, and I'd hate for it to be out-of-date already. :P

Paper

[nickpbrooks]

There was a paper on this in Quaternary Internationl earlier this year. You can download the paper from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~e118/wsahara/WSahara-docs.htm. This is the "in press" version, but will be updated when I get around to it. The focus on agriculture is a red herring - there's not anything new about agriculture in the paper. The focus of the paper is the development of "complex societies" or the first "civilisations". Invoking the environment is nothing new, but most ideas at the moment stress the role of a benign environment. What I was trying to do here was link archaeological with palaeo-environmental data for a number of regions, which as far as I know, no-one has done before. And I'm trying not to be too deterministic! Regards, Nick.

[rimrunner]

I recently listened to The Weather Makers on audiobook and wondered about this, specifically in reference to ancient Egypt. Now, I don't know much about ancient Egypt or how that civilization came to be, but the book's account of the Sahara between the last ice age and now made me think.

[deleonjh]

Umm, the theory that agriculture arose in marginal environments was in my first year text book six years ago, and it wasn't a new textbook so the theory must have been around for a while. I had gotten the impression that this was the accepted theory and that the one about agriculture being developed in abundant environments was the older one. The climate change angle was also there, though there was no specific period mentioned.

[kabuki_no_kaze]

I think this is yet another example of the popular press taking several years to get the memo. Pop anthropology tends to be, at best, last decade's theories.

[sollersuk]

At least a decade. About twenty years I was taught that what triggered the adoption of agriculture in the UK was the impossibility of getting by with hunter-gathering (at least partly because of over-burning of forests to get hazel trees to grow - near where I live is still largely sour peat bog as a result)