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Post by missouriboy on Jan 19, 2018 21:29:13 GMT
I don't think we have a thread like this so it seemed logical since I'm interested in it and perhaps it could be useful to see how very early technological peoples handled change ... as much as has been found (with many hypotheses) in archaeology and more recent DNA testing. While we are technologically more robust a new cold period could still affect us. This is a brief summary from the literature.
Indo-Europeans and Climate Change
Prior to 4200 BC (6200 ybp) a group whom dna-testing have labeled R-1b (the very major dna of much of modern Europe), expanded a herding economy into one with a farming mix as they spread west from north of the Black Sea onto the Lower Danube Basin. This was also the first region in Europe to take up copper mining. A cold period (6200 ybp - 5800 ybp) afflicted Europe ... "Balkan settlements were abandoned and Balkan metallurgy collapsed. Mines in Bulgaria ceased production. Some Balkan copper workers may have fled westwards into Italy and Sardinia." (Jean Manco. Blood of the Celts, 2015). Those who were still largely herders apparently stayed more in place and adapted their technology. There is a thesis that they switched from a largely meat diet supplemented with grains, to a larger milk diet, thus more lactose-tolerance in European populations.
As the climate warmed, a portion of these tribes (clans) moved back into the central Hungarian Basin along the Danube and re-established agriculture and the mines. This core group (now called the Yamnaya culture), extending from the Black Sea to the Hungarian Plains, shed waves of people westward along a broad corridor of south-central Europe for the next 3000 years. A large related gene pool (haplogroup) slowly broke up into subclades that are currently recognized by specific mutations on the Y-chromosome. Different tribal / family group migrations carried different mutations that became subclades of their own in different areas, but retained the earlier mutation that ties them all together.
The earliest waves fleeing the cold (and drought?) established a metallurgy, farming, livestock economy everywhere they settled along the southern European sea coasts through north-central Italy, south France, Spain, Brittany, Cornwall and south Ireland ... and of course many of these areas had copper. Ships developed early on and trade was extensive. By 4500 ybp it is proposed that there is an inter-related economy functioning from the Med to the southern Isles.
Something appears to have happened about 4500-4200 ybp that resulted in a refocus of power to areas along the headwaters of the Rhine and Danube, flowing westward into central France and down the Rhine. There was an extreme cold period of 4200-4100 ybp that has been linked to the fall of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and many other centers. This period is associated with a new set of Y-subclades, including R-U152 which is often used as a marker for the later Celtic People. There were other cold periods (3800-3500 ybp & 3200-3100 ybp). The latter seems to have resulted in major collapses in Bronze Age cultures. As climate warmed over the next 1500 years, ascending to the Roman Warm Period, a whole chariot-warrior elite assemblage, together with an extremely advanced metallurgy (La Tene culture that peaked ca 2500 ybp) arose and dominated Central and NW Europe until the Roman conquest ca 2000-1800 ybp This was helped out by the pressure of Germanic peoples (U106) east of the Rhine. While Proto-Celtic peoples had been in N_C Italy since at least 6000 ybp, new Celtic tribes move south and sacked Rome 390 BC. Others moved north all the way to Jutland and the south-central British Isles. Under pressure from Germans and Romans, Celts moved to Britain in various waves over this period, After 400 AD, Angles, Saxons and Jutes began a long conquest of eastern-central England, perhaps fueled in part by cooling after 1600 ybp..
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Post by Ratty on Jan 20, 2018 1:01:04 GMT
I won't have much to offer ** but I will follow this thread with interest. ** Shut up Sig, Missouri, Naut, Acid, Code, etc .....  |
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Post by hrizzo on Jan 20, 2018 7:43:24 GMT
Climate and Civilization for the past 4,000 yearsThe Holocene Thermal Optimum ended at different times in different parts of the world, but it had ended everywhere by 4,000 BP (BP here means the number of years before 2000) and the world began to cool. The timeline shown in Figure 1 shows the GISP2 Central Greenland ice core temperature proxies in blue and the HadCRUT 4.4 surface temperature estimates for the same area in red.
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Post by missouriboy on Jan 20, 2018 9:18:16 GMT
Climate and Civilization for the past 4,000 yearsThe Holocene Thermal Optimum ended at different times in different parts of the world, but it had ended everywhere by 4,000 BP (BP here means the number of years before 2000) and the world began to cool. The timeline shown in Figure 1 shows the GISP2 Central Greenland ice core temperature proxies in blue and the HadCRUT 4.4 surface temperature estimates for the same area in red. Thank you Hrizzo. I intend to read the whole book. “ …cooling has always resulted in major social upheavals, whereas warming has sometimes led to a blossoming of culture. If we can learn anything from the history of culture, it is that, even if humans were ‘children of the Ice Age’, civilization was a product of climatic warming.”
“The future is hard to foresee. Serious scientists should refrain from slipping into the role of Nostradamus. Computer simulations cannot be better than the premises that guided the input of data: they show what is expected to happen, not the actual future. The history of the sciences is also a history of false theories and wrong predictions.”Settled science is an oxymoron. |
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Post by Ratty on Jan 20, 2018 12:02:33 GMT
Climate and Civilization for the past 4,000 yearsThe Holocene Thermal Optimum ended at different times in different parts of the world, but it had ended everywhere by 4,000 BP (BP here means the number of years before 2000) and the world began to cool. The timeline shown in Figure 1 shows the GISP2 Central Greenland ice core temperature proxies in blue and the HadCRUT 4.4 surface temperature estimates for the same area in red. The source of one of my favourite charts. Thanks Hrizzo.  |
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Post by glennkoks on Jan 20, 2018 14:19:59 GMT
Douglas Kennett at Penn State is probably the leading scholar on the Mayan Collapse now attributed to climate change from 1020-1100 C.E. cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt105561mh/qt105561mh.pdfPersonally, I have been skeptical of the theory that climate change caused the Mayan Collapse but it seems to be the leading culprit in academia nowadays. I do know that it would make it much easier for a starving Anthropologist to get funding by proposing the thesis that climate change was the leading contributor to the Mayan demise. It stands to reason that if climate change wiped out the Mayan's AGW could do the same. I just find it odd that when I was a young lad in college majoring in Anthropology climate change was never even mentioned as factor in the demise of the Central American civilization. Now it is the primary factor? I remain skeptical. |
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Post by missouriboy on Jan 20, 2018 15:04:39 GMT
Douglas Kennett at Penn State is probably the leading scholar on the Mayan Collapse now attributed to climate change from 1020-1100 C.E. cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt105561mh/qt105561mh.pdfPersonally, I have been skeptical of the theory that climate change caused the Mayan Collapse but it seems to be the leading culprit in academia nowadays. I do know that it would make it much easier for a starving Anthropologist to get funding by proposing the thesis that climate change was the leading contributor to the Mayan demise. It stands to reason that if climate change wiped out the Mayan's AGW could do the same. I just find it odd that when I was a young lad in college majoring in Anthropology climate change was never even mentioned as factor in the demise of the Central American civilization. Now it is the primary factor? I remain skeptical. Granted - a wonderful place to find your self in. I was semi-politely told that today's millions of Maya "take issue with the term wiped out". Perhaps " set back" they said. As in early European cold periods if people started starving, elite institutional order may have collapsed, Insurrection and invasion took their toll on cities, and many were abandoned. In the case of herding societies, they moved, adapted and buried their dead along the way. But the people survived, minus the unknown unfortunate fraction. If they had been literate, there might be many stories titled something like ... "how Daddy Herder and his brothers acquired farms and extra wives in the south of France". |
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Post by nautonnier on Jan 20, 2018 19:52:37 GMT
Climate and Civilization for the past 4,000 yearsThe Holocene Thermal Optimum ended at different times in different parts of the world, but it had ended everywhere by 4,000 BP (BP here means the number of years before 2000) and the world began to cool. The timeline shown in Figure 1 shows the GISP2 Central Greenland ice core temperature proxies in blue and the HadCRUT 4.4 surface temperature estimates for the same area in red. Thank you Hrizzo. I intend to read the whole book. “ …cooling has always resulted in major social upheavals, whereas warming has sometimes led to a blossoming of culture. If we can learn anything from the history of culture, it is that, even if humans were ‘children of the Ice Age’, civilization was a product of climatic warming.”
“The future is hard to foresee. Serious scientists should refrain from slipping into the role of Nostradamus. Computer simulations cannot be better than the premises that guided the input of data: they show what is expected to happen, not the actual future. The history of the sciences is also a history of false theories and wrong predictions.”Settled science is an oxymoron. These timelines have a very close correspondence to the Egyptian Old, Middle and New kingdoms. It is widely believed that each kingdom collapsed when the climate altered and the Nile failed to flood providing natural fertilizer for crop growing. Indeed, the reason that Egypt formed in the first place is thought to be due to rains failing in what is now the Sahara. |
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Post by Ratty on Jan 21, 2018 1:17:40 GMT
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Post by missouriboy on Jan 21, 2018 2:17:36 GMT
Thank you Hrizzo. I intend to read the whole book. “ …cooling has always resulted in major social upheavals, whereas warming has sometimes led to a blossoming of culture. If we can learn anything from the history of culture, it is that, even if humans were ‘children of the Ice Age’, civilization was a product of climatic warming.”
“The future is hard to foresee. Serious scientists should refrain from slipping into the role of Nostradamus. Computer simulations cannot be better than the premises that guided the input of data: they show what is expected to happen, not the actual future. The history of the sciences is also a history of false theories and wrong predictions.”Settled science is an oxymoron. These timelines have a very close correspondence to the Egyptian Old, Middle and New kingdoms. It is widely believed that each kingdom collapsed when the climate altered and the Nile failed to flood providing natural fertilizer for crop growing. Indeed, the reason that Egypt formed in the first place is thought to be due to rains failing in what is now the Sahara. This time around, Egypt has way more people than the Nile can feed. If the grain ships stop coming, Egypt starves. In 1960, Egypt had 27 million people. Today they have 96 million. |
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Post by glennkoks on Jan 21, 2018 15:45:39 GMT
These timelines have a very close correspondence to the Egyptian Old, Middle and New kingdoms. It is widely believed that each kingdom collapsed when the climate altered and the Nile failed to flood providing natural fertilizer for crop growing. Indeed, the reason that Egypt formed in the first place is thought to be due to rains failing in what is now the Sahara. This time around, Egypt has way more people than the Nile can feed. If the grain ships stop coming, Egypt starves. In 1960, Egypt had 27 million people. Today they have 96 million. It gets complicated. While population has increased so has our ability to produce. We could increase effort quite a bit to offset any shortfall in production caused by a climate shift to a colder/wetter pattern. Currently commodity prices remain in the tank. However poorer countries that do no produce will suffer first. Which is why I keep a close watch on grain prices. Any stress in our ability to feed our ever growing population will show up in the markets first. Free market capitalism can be a very accurate forecasting tool. www.earth-policy.org/datacenter/xls/update31_1.xls |
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Post by hrizzo on Jan 27, 2018 14:03:03 GMT
Impact of Climate Change on Human Evolution: The Odyssey from AfricaPaleoclimatology, the study of climate in the past all the way back to deep time, is one of the pillars of climate science. It shows us the wide range of climates that have existed on earth, from near-global glaciation in “snowball-earth” epochs to hothouses where the poles were forested. It puts in a correct perspective discussion about climate change – dismissing any notion that climate has ever done anything other than endlessly change.
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Post by missouriboy on Jan 27, 2018 16:11:43 GMT
This time around, Egypt has way more people than the Nile can feed. If the grain ships stop coming, Egypt starves. In 1960, Egypt had 27 million people. Today they have 96 million. It gets complicated. While population has increased so has our ability to produce. We could increase effort quite a bit to offset any shortfall in production caused by a climate shift to a colder/wetter pattern. Currently commodity prices remain in the tank. However poorer countries that do no produce will suffer first. Which is why I keep a close watch on grain prices. Any stress in our ability to feed our ever growing population will show up in the markets first. Free market capitalism can be a very accurate forecasting tool. www.earth-policy.org/datacenter/xls/update31_1.xlsWhile following the grain prices, maybe we should add vegetables as a shorter-term index. Don't know how theses commodity prices are tracked on the markets ... but, having a short shelf life, these might provide a reflection on shorter-term weather changes, while grains, with a relatively long shelf life, might be more indicative of longer-term weather changes. Found this ... www.ams.usda.gov/market-news/fruit-and-vegetable-terminal-markets-standard-reports |
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Post by sigurdur on Jan 28, 2018 21:33:51 GMT
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Post by nautonnier on Jan 29, 2018 10:37:59 GMT
So the entire world is showing 'greening' which means more 'carbon' has been taken up and more plants are converting CO2 to oxygen because the green means photosynthesis. The IPCC claim of centuries of atmospheric residence time for CO2 are obviously false as the 'sink' is growing as well as the 'source'. Note that the standard genuflection to 'global warming' has to be added at the end: "Going forward, Wang said, the positive effect of carbon dioxide-induced water savings may eventually be offset by the negative effect of carbon dioxide-induced temperature increases when the temperature increase crosses a certain threshold."Presumably otherwise they would not have been allowed to publish/get more research grant. |
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