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Originally posted by kikuyu22:
Mike111,I'm quite interested in his hypotheses;I'm sure I SPEAK FOR OTHERS.Pls allow him to post. I found his European nuclear albinization plan for refugees realllllly out there but imo he's onto smth.

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Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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THE WORLD WAS ENTERING A PERIOD OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE. In Europe, this was evidenced by rising sea levels and the emergence of malaria in the North Sea region, while in Asia from the start of the fourth century SHARPLY REDUCED SALINITY IN THE ARAL SEA, MARKEDLY DIFFERENT VEGETATION ON THE STEPPES (EVIDENT FROM HIGH-RESOLUTION POLLEN ANALYSES) AND NEW PATTERNS OF GLACIER ADVANCES IN THE TIAN SHAN RANGE ALL SHOW FUNDAMENTAL SHIFTS IN GLOBAL CLIMATIC CHANGE.


THE RESULTS WERE DEVASTATING, ATTESTED BY A REMARKABLE LETTER WRITTEN BY A SOGDIAN TRADER IN THE EARLY FOURTH CENTURY AND NOT FOUND FAR FROM DUNHUANG IN WESTERN CHINA. THE MERCHANT RECOUNTED TO HIS FELLOW TRADERS THAT FOOD SHORTAGES AND FAMINE HAD TAKEN A HEAVY TOLL THAT SUCH CATASTROPHE HAD BEFALLEN CHINA AS TO BE BARELY DESCRIBABLE. The emperor had fled from the capital, setting fire to his palace as he left, while the Sogdian merchant communities were gone, WIPED BY STARVATION AND DEATH. DO NOT BOTHER TRYING TO TRADE THERE, THE AUTHOR ADVISED, “THERE IS NO PROFIT FROM YOU TO GAIN FROM IT”….THE SITUATION WAS APOCALYPTIC.


The CHAOS CREATED THE PERFECT CONDITIONS FOR THE MOSAIC OF STEPPE TRIBES TO CONSOLIDATE. THESE PEOPLE INHABITED THE BELTS OF LAND LINKING MONGOLIA WITH THE PLAINS OF CENTRAL EUROPE, WHERE CONTROL OF THE BEST GRAZING LAND AND OF RELIABLE WATER SUPPLY GUARANTEED CONSIDERABLE POLITICAL POWER. ONE TRIBE NOW ESTABLISHED THEMSELVES AS MASTERS OF THE STEPPES, CRUSHING ALL BEFORE THEM. The Sogdian trader referred to the architects of his APOCALYPSE IN HIS LETTER AS THE XWN. THEY WERE THE XIONGNU- BETTER KNOWN IN THE WEST AS THE HUNS.


BETWEEN 350 AND 360 THERE WAS A HUGE WAVE OF MIGRATION AS TRIBES WERE SHUNTED OFF THEIR LANDS AND DRIVEN WESTWARDS. THIS WAS MOST LIKELY CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE, WHICH MADE LIFE ON THE STEPPE EXCEPTION-ALLY HARSH AND TRIGGERED INTENSE COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES. THE IMPACT WAS FELT FROM BACTRIA IN NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN RIGHT UP TO THE ROMAN FRONTIER ON THE DANUBE, where refugees began to appear in large numbers, begging to be allowed to resettle on imperial territory after being driven off their lands north of the Black Sea by the advancing Huns.


¬THE SITUATION QUICKLY BECAME DANGEROUSLY UNSTABLE. A massive Roman army send to restore order was heavily defeated on the flat plains of Thrace in 378, with the Emperor Valens among the many casualties. THE DEFENSES BURST OPEN, AND TRIBE AFTER TRIBE POURED THROUGH INTO THE EMPIRE’S WESTERN PROVINCES, THREATENING ROME AS A RESULT. PREVIOUSLY, THE NORTHERN LIP OF THE BLACK SEA AND THE STEPPE LANDS STRETCHING DEEP INTO ASIA HAD BEEN REGARDED AS IMPLACABLY BARBAROUS, FILLED WITH FIERCE WARRIORS AND EMPTY OF CIVILIZATION OR RESOURCES. IT HAD NOT CROSSED ROME’S MIND THAT THESE REGIONS COULD ACTS AS ARTERIES, JUST LIKE THE ROUTES LINKING THE WEST WITH THE EAST THROUGH PERSIA AND THROUGH EGYPT. THESE VERY REGIONS WERE ABOUT TO DELIVER DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, INTO THE VERY HEART OF EUROPE.

DISPLACEMENT ACROSS THE STEPPES NORTH OF THE BLACK SEA, HAD CREATED A PERFECT STORM THAT LED TO THE EMPIRE’S FRONTIERS, ON THE RHINE BEING OVERWHELMED…BURNING OR NOT, ROME’S EMPIRE IN THE WEST NOW FELL APART. SOON SPAIN WAS BEING RAVAGED, ATTACKED BY TRIBES SUCH AS THE ALANS, WHOSE HOMELANDS LAY FAR AWAY BETWEEN THE CASPIAN AND BLACK SEAS, AND WHO’S TRADE IN SABLE SKINS HAD BEEN CAREFULLY CHARTED BY COMMENTATORS WRITING IN CHINA, TWO CENTURIES EARLIER. Another TRIBAL GROUPING, THE VANDALS, WHO HAD BEEN DISPLACED BY THE HUNS, REACHED ROMAN NORTH AFRICA BY THE 420’, TAKING CONTROL OF PRINCIPAL CITY, CARTHAGE, AS WELL AS THE VIBRANT AND LUCRATIVE SURROUNDING PROVINCES THAT SUPPLIED MOST OF THE WESTERN HALF OF THE EMPIRE….

AS IF THIS WERE NOT BAD ENOUGH. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, HAVING FLUSHED FORWARD A HOTCH-POTCH OF TRIBES- TEREVINGIAN GOTHS, ALANS, VANDALS, SUEVI, GEPIDS, NEURIANS, BASTARNIANS, AND OTHERS- BESIDES THE HUNS THEMSELVES APPEARED IN EUROPE, LED BY THE MOST FAMOUS FIGURE OF LATE ANTIQUITY: ATILLA….


THE HUNS CAUSED PURE TERROR…THEY HAD NO INTEREST IN AGRICULTURE, NOTED ANOTHER, AND ONLY WANTED TO STEAL FROM THEIR NEIGHBORS, ENSLAVING THEM IN THE PROCESS: THEY WERE LIKE WOLVES.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE HUNS SPELT SERIOUS DANGER FOR THE EASTERN HALF OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, WHICH HAD THUS FAR HAS BEEN RELATIVELY UNSCATHED BY THE UPHEAVALS THAT DEVASTATED MUCH OF EUROPE. The provinces of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were still intact, as was the magnificent city of Constantinople.

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They also found in a number of locations, most clearly in the northern Levant, that late Roman times saw a massive volume of soil erosion. In the Levant, this soil loss permanently ruined regions that had supported agriculture for millennia. Clearly Roman pressures of populations and empire put significant stress on Mediterranean landscapes, beyond the signals of human presence and alteration that since the Late Neolithic appear in many Old World ecological studies. But this impact was not, apparently continuous, but sudden, late in the Roman period.


The author of the best study of this late Roman erosion sees a “high likelihood” that climate-the specifically-a shift toward intense seasonal rains at the transition to the Dark Ages played a role in this degradation. There is now reasonably definitive evidence for this “likelihood”: new studies show conclusively that following the onset of North Atlantic ice rafting around AD 350, the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted from a more positive to a more negative mode, pushing the winter westerlies south into the Mediterranean, bringing a surge of winter and spring precipitation, after hundreds of years of moderately dry climate. Flooding recorded in the sediments along the Arno Riber-including entire ships buried in flood deposits- suggests that episodes of extreme rain might have begun around 300 BC in central Italy. Fredric Cheyette sees these advancing rains as fundamentally undermining the grain-based economy of Italy and Southern France.


In South central Anatolia, a century-long drought broke sharply around AD 540, followed by several hundred years of humidity, suggesting enhanced rainfall. In Northern Europe, precipitation dropped significantly between AD 200 and AD 350, recovered, and then fell again to the millennial lows around AD 450, as the NAO negative mode set in for the Dark Ages. Thus these paleoecological studies strongly suggest the massive soil degradation associated with the Roman empire was driven by population pressure and climatic contingency,

A Central structural dynamic in the decline of Rome, particularly its western domain, has to lie in a spiraling population decline, which undermined military recruitment, economic demand, and even political skill. The most obvious explanation for this relentless but mosaic pattern of demographic decline lies in the series of epidemics that swept along Mediterranean trade routes and lines of March starting in the late second century. William McNeill, in his classic Plagues and People, explains the epidemics of late antiquity in terms of the confluence of civilizational disease pools, and suggests that growing population and growing trade along the Old World core running from China through India to the Mediterranean was a powerful conduit for new diseases. The fact that epidemics struck China soon after they hit the Mediterranean suggests the possibility that India may have been the source of the plague probably lay in the tangle of Central Asian routes: one team of geneticists argues that its ultimate genetic root lies in the Tibetan plateau.

While epidemic disease was a constant in the Roman world, three epidemics stand out as particularly intense, with impacts perhaps rivaling that of the Black Death of the 1350’s. The first of these, the Antonine Plague, carried back to Rome by legions returned from Babylon and an assault on the Parthian empire, struck a reasonably stable empire in Ad 165. Generally thought to have been small box, the Antoine Plague lasted for fifteen years, and ended after it may have killed Marcus Aurelius, the last of a line of five so called Good Emperors who had ruled since AD 96.


Epidemics then struck various parts of the empire every twenty-five to thirty years; in Nubia in 200; in the armies of the Euphrates in the 232; and then another fifteen-year-long epidemics, Cyprian’s Plague, perhaps smallpox, perhaps measles, apparently emerged from Ethiopia in AD 251. Localized epidemics are recorded over the fourth and fifth centuries, often associated with warfare, but in AD 542 a deadly epidemic known as Justinian’s Plague spread north from Egypt; now genetically identified as bubonic plague, this epidemic flared, ebbed, and flared again for centuries, before it finally faded in the 800’s.


From the beginning of the third century, Rome was wracked by challenges from beyond its borders, and wars constantly fed on both famines and epidemics. The Antonine Plague of 165-80 was introduced by warfare in the east, and Cyprian’s Plague of 251-66 was embedded in a long series of wars to defend the frontiers running from 234-84, at the end of which the empire was effectively divided in half. Epidemics accompanied wars in 310-13, 359-63, 378-9, 406-10, and from the 440’s to the 470’s.


The Justinian Plague arrived to Italy in 542, during the Gothic-Byzantine Wars; the combinations of war, famine, and epidemics brought utter and final devastation to the ancient center of empire. As local trade collapsed, rural Italians abandoned the lowlands and huddled in rough new mountain villages, as they had in the last crisis, at the close of the Bronze Age. Thus a dynamic of first war and epidemic, and then a triad of climate, war, and epidemic, has to lie at the center of an explanation of the long decline and final collapse of the empire.


In 378, two years before the establishment of Christianity, a barbarian horde destroyed the Roman army at the battle of Adrianople; by 410 these Visigoths had sacked Rome and moved on to Gaul in search of land. By this point CLIMATE CHANGE seems to have once again entered the picture. The Goths were one of a variety of groups pressing in upon the Roman frontiers, attracted by an increasingly poorly defender frontier, but also entering into complex trade relations across this boundary. Increasingly they were harried by a new group from the steppe, by a new group, the Huns, who had emerged recently from the Central Asian steppes.


If the empire itself was not affected initially by climate change, tree ring evidence from the edge of the steppes, suggests that after AD 200, and more decisively after AD 350- an increasing frequency of drought put Germans, Goths, and Huns on the move and into Europe. Climate change may have contributed to agrarian disruption on and beyond the frontiers: pressed by the Huns, the Visigoths were in a desperate search for food and supply, when they demanded entry into the empire, leading to the battle of Adrianople. Such droughts seem to have been a manifestation of the onset of the cooler climate across the Northern Hemisphere, marked by ice rafting off Greenland, though not by any serious advance of the Siberian High.


If conditions certainly did not reach the scale of the final Bronze Age crisis or the Little Ice age that would arrive a millennium later, it is clear that the Classical optimum was over, and for the duration of the ice rafting episode, roughly running from AD 375 to AD 800, climate conditions in northwest Eurasia were colder and more variable than during the Classical Optimum on the ensuring medieval Optimum, so called. Very roughly, these were the textbook dark ages.

A fascinating argument links an episode of catastrophic climate change and the onset of the Justinian’s plague and indeed the end of the classical age around the old world. The IPCC study of northern hemispheric temperature based on tree rings indicate a short but vicious spike of cold temperatures around AD 540…David Keys has compiled the evidence to support the argument that a massive volcanic eruption in AD 536, blanketing the earth in a Sulphur haze. Keys placed this eruption in Indonesia or Papua New Guinea, but recent work suggests that the location was the volcano Ilopango in El Salvador. Cutting solar input for as much as a decade, this volcanic haze was recorded in texts from Britain to Korea, describing dark days, a dim sun, and mid-summer frosts; in South China it rained yellow dust that could be “scooped up in handfuls”.


Keys argues that this brief disruption had a series of profound effects. Droughts across the Asian grasslands sent a final wave of nomads against the frontiers of the Eastern [Roman] empire, further eroding a Roman legacy finally lost when the Turks- set in motion in the 540’s by droughts in Mongolia- destroyed the last vestiges of Byzantium in the mid-fifteenth century.

In Yemen, Keys argues, that massive floods following the 536 event from the 540’s to the 590’s destroyed the massive Marib Dam- which had destroyed the population and political power of Yemen, allowing the balance in Arabia to shift to Medina. Hence the prophet Muhammed emerged to found Islam, a world religion that –with Christanity- would redefine the cultural geography of the shattered pieces of the Ancient Mediterranean and south-west empires.


The plague itself was a product of the 536 event, Keys also argues. He proposes that the rains that followed a decade of post-eruption drought set off a burst of reproduction among mice in East Africa, mice carrying fleas that are hosts to the Bubonic plague. He argues that with the explosion of the mouse population, fleas carrying the plague bacillus were transferred to the black rats living in the shipping involved in transporting elephant ivory north through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. This sequence, he suggests, was the origin of the Justinian plague that hit the Mediterranean in 542 and then flared for centuries.


The Dark ages, AD 400-900


Very broadly and diffusely, the end of a global classical antiquity was shaped in some measure by a Climatic global dark age, running from roughly AD 400 to AD 900. This reversal was coherent in many parts of the world, but it did not have the reach and consequence of the two Hallstatt minimum/Siberian high epochs that bracketed both classical antiquity and the middle ages. Rather than a strong Siberian High at work, these climatic dark ages were marked in a cold northern hemisphere by a round of North Atlantic ice rafting, and by ENSO variation in the Pacific tilting toward the El Nino mode, with erratic floods and droughts along the Andean coast.


Leaving the causal forces to the climate scientists, we can map the impacts of climate stress in the post-Ancient Dark ages, between AD 400 and AD 900. Population stagnated in Europe and China, which barely managed by AD 1000 to restore the population levels of AD 200, 800 years earlier. Similar forces may have shaped the rough contours of Indian history…Measures of the South Asian monsoon, suggest increasingly drier conditions during the dark ages, consonant with a colder north, a cooler West pacific warm pool, and the El Nino ENSO mode.


The classical Gupta empire emerged in the Ganges valley around 315, was at its peak between 375 and 415, and completely gone by 550. The Gupta seemed to have emerged after harsh droughts at the turn of the fourth century and collapsed after similar droughts at the end of the fifth century. The arrival of a branch of the Huns from Central Asia at around 500 contributed to the final collapse of the Gupta Empire into warring kingdoms. Islamic Arabs began to conquer the Western approaches to the subcontinent in the eight century, when two estimates show South Asia in the midst of a long advance toward drought conditions running from roughly AD 600 to AD 900.


The first several centuries of the Dark Age climate pattern were the background context for the rise and spread of Islam in Arabia and across the arid zone from India to Spain. It seems likely that the catastrophe flooding of the early Dark ages, with the ongoing impacts of the Justinian plague, shaped the march of early Islam.


On the Positive side, however the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia continued to have relatively high precipitation throughout the negative NAO Dark ages. Such might well have provided the material, underpinnings of the strength of the Islamic Golden Age, and an agriculture that supported the rise of cities across the Arab-Islamic domain.


Here opinion is divided, with one camp describing an Islamic Green Revolution of new species and new agricultural techniques, while another sees more continuities with classical times and only minimal population growth across the Islamic world; but it may well turn out that Islamic achievements were based in some small measure in the stronger southerly flow of the Atlantic winter westerlies.


All of the various estimates for ENSO on the Andean coasts suggest a sequence of wild extremes of precipitation between AD 400 and AD 1000…The onset of the Dark Age ENSO climatic whiplash conditions shaped the collapse of two Early Intermediate Peruvian cultures, the Moche and the Nasca, which emerged around 200 BC and collapsed in a burst of mega-El Nino flooding and a severe drought in the late 500’s AD; at roughly the same time the great city-state of Teotihuacan collapsed, as droughts hit the Mexican highlands.


The final transformation of the Maya around AD 900 was one symptom of a wider global climatic event that intensified the closing century of the Dark Age climatic system. A minor solar minimum and coincident volcanic eruptions seem to have driven a simultaneous drop in northern hemisphere temperatures, the advance of the Chinese cold winter monsoon, and the retreat of the Asian summer monsoon. In particular the fate of societies in the Americas and in China are curiously linked, and suggests a Pacific influence was at work.


These events unfolded exactly at the same time as the Mayan crisis and broadly with the collapse of Andean Middle Horizon cultures, and comprised some of the final acts of the global Dark ages. There are thus remarkable parallels in the fate of societies around the cricum-Pacific during this millennium, shaped, it would appear, by a trans-Pacific pattern of climatic change linked along the ITCZ, and by its southward shift during the 800’s and 900’s. Intense drought in the Yucatan and El Nino flooding followed by drought along the Andean coast matched intense winter cold in North-East Asia.


On both sides of the ocean, long established societies collapsed as productive systems failed, people starved, and rebellions and wars destroyed ancient patterns of authority. And these late Dark Age Pacific events had their Atlantic analogs as well, during several centuries of recorded severe winters between 750 and 950, across Europe to the Black sea, which match up with indications of volcanic eruptions in the Greenland ice records. Broadly coinciding with the Carolingian empires launched by Charlemagne, this sequence of cold winter climates stressed, if it did not impede, the rise of Western Europe at the close of the first millennium.

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The Hephtalites in Persia

After occupying Bactria, the strong White Hun army made its way toward Persia. The fact that a so-called nomadic nation, like the Hephtalites and their predecessors, the Kushans, wanted to conquer the settled, wealthy peoples of ancient culture was understandable from their point of view. The nomadic nations were stock-breeders and agricultural peoples in the Bronze Age, according to the archeological finds.


However, because of the climatic change in Central Asia, their cultivated fields became steppes or even uncultivable deserts. At that time, they adopted the nomadic, pastoral way of life "with their high degree of adaptation to the environmental possibilities".[9] These harsh circumstances made them strong, brave warriors. Since they possessed only the products derived from stock-breeding, and the exchange of these products did not cover their needs, sometime they had to plunder the richer settled countries surrounding Central Asia. For them, war was almost a profession of livelihood. Initially, they obtained their booty or tribute from China but the Chinese began to build walls as a protection against them.


After that, the nomads wandered toward the west; one group of them occupied the Transcaucasian territories, while others migrated to the south into the small oasis-states of Fergana and Sogdiana and later to Bactria and Gandhara; finally the "fabulous India" became the target of their conquests. They were slowly assimilated into the peoples of the occupied lands; the majority of the tribes even settled there because they did not want to go back to the severe climate of the steppes or the deserts.

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Page 158


Warfare was not the only cataclysm that befall the provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 540’s. For reasons that are not entirely clear (although a major volcanic explosion in East Asia perhaps provides the most plausible explanation), the 530’s represented a period of extreme and violent climatic instability in much of the known world. The impact of climate change on the delicate grassland ecology of the Eurasian steppe may well explain the dynamic shift in political fortunes there that was to result in the expansion of the Turks towards Persia and the West. Nomadic armies, after all relied on their horses and horses depended on pasture.


Pg170

As already seen, the military security of both the Eastern Roman and Sasanian Empires was critically sensitive to military and political developments on the grasslands of the West Eurasian steppe. Political and military conditions on the steppe were themselves highly sensitive to climate change.

Any abnormal variation in temperature risked having a dramatic impact on the availability and quality of grassland on which the nomad powers and tribal confederations of the region depended for their military might; for these were, as we have seen, cavalry empires, their warriors famed for their swiftness on horseback and dexterity with bow, reliant on a ready supply of well-fed mounts.

A late sixth-century Byzantine military handbook (the so called Strategikon of Maurice) noted of such Scythians…and “others whose way of life resembles that of the Hunnic peoples”, that that “they are hurt by a shortage of fodder which can result from the huge numbers of horses they bring with them. “


“Also in event of battle, when opposed by an infantry force in close formation, they stay on their horses and do not dismount, for they do not last long fighting on foot.” The 530’s, as seen in the previous chapter, was a period of climactic instability, and was recorded as such by chroniclers, historians, and witnesses from as far afield as Ireland, Gaul, China, and Japan.

This in turn opened the way to a major reconfiguration of power relations on the steppe, resulting in a renewed period of political and military insecurity for both Persia, and ultimately, Byzantium, associated with the demise of the Hephthalites and the arrival on Persia’s frontiers of the Turk Khaganate.

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Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought - with measurements dating back to 138BC
Tree-rings prove climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now - and world has been cooling for 2,000 years
Study of semi-fossilised trees gives accurate climate reading back to 138BC
World was warmer in Roman and Medieval times than it is now
How did the Romans grow grapes in northern England? Perhaps because it was warmer than we thought.

A study suggests the Britain of 2,000 years ago experienced a lengthy period of hotter summers than today.

German researchers used data from tree rings – a key indicator of past climate – to claim the world has been on a ‘long-term cooling trend’ for two millennia until the global warming of the twentieth century.

This cooling was punctuated by a couple of warm spells.

These are the Medieval Warm Period, which is well known, but also a period during the toga-wearing Roman times when temperatures were apparently 1 deg C warmer than now.

They say the very warm period during the years 21 to 50AD has been underestimated by climate scientists.

Lead author Professor Dr Jan Esper of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz said: ‘We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.

‘This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant, however it is not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1 deg C.’

In general the scientists found a slow cooling of 0.6C over 2,000 years, which they attributed to changes in the Earth’s orbit which took it further away from the Sun.

The study is published in Nature Climate Change.

It is based on measurements stretching back to 138BC.

The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming

Professor Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC.

In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling.
Professor Esper said: 'Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.’

The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.

Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles.

In the cold environment of Finnish Lapland, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.
”Global cooling: It is the first time that researchers have been able to accurately measure trends in global temperature over the last two millennia”

”The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were”
The density measurements correlate closely with the summer temperatures in this area on the edge of the Nordic taiga; the researchers were thus able to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality.

The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.

In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form.

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So here once again we have, A DIRECT ADMISSION, THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS WHAT CAUSED the MIGRATION PERIOD OF WHITE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES THROUGHOUT EUROPE AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND MANY EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS AND CAUSED ALL SORTS OF CONFLICTS AND WARS, AND POWER SHIFTS AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES!

Please take everything that I’ve said above and in my sources seriously, ES, and consider what the information here being presented means and what the LARGE HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS OF IT ARE! Because it’s clear to me that CLIMATIC SHIFTING AND COOLING EVENTS, LIKE THE LITTLE ICE AGE, AND PLAGUE OUTBREAKS AS AN INDIRECT RESULT OF IT; is what CAUSED THE DOWNFALL AND COLLAPSE OF BLACK EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONS AND SOCIETIES IN EUROPE!

Just like how global climate shifts and changing events, IS WHAT CAUSED THE COLLAPSES AND DESTRUCTIONS AND EVENTUALL FALLINGS, of civilizations across the entire globe, from the Mayan, to the Persian, to the Chinese, to the Indians etc etc etc.

And all the proofs and sources TO PROVE AND CONFIRM THAT OUTRIGHT, ARE CONTAINED IN THIS POST, AND IN MY OTHER POSTS AND SOURCES THAT I HAVE PROVIDED IN THIS VERY THREAD!

Posts: 1558 | From: US | Registered: Sep 2015  |  IP: Logged | 

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Plague pit with skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, found at abbey in Lincolnshire


Mass burial pits remain unusual from disease that killed around half of Britain's population




A plague pit containing the skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, has been discovered at the site of a 14th century monastery hospital.

The macabre find in Thornton Abbey, near Immingham in North Lincolnshire, was discovered by a team from Sheffield University.


The presence of such a large burial site - which included both male and female adults as well as the children - suggests the community was overwhelmed by Black Death and left unable to cope with the number of people who died, they said.

The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.


The disease is documented to have reached Lincolnshire in the spring of 1349.

The team said they sent teeth samples from the skeletons found at the Thornton Abbey site to McMaster University in Canada, where ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the tooth pulp. DNA test revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague.

Dr Hugh Willmott, Sheffield University's Department of Archaeology, said: "Despite the fact it is now estimated that up to half the population of England perished during the Black Death, multiple graves associated with the event are extremely rare in this country, and it seems local communities continued to dispose of their loved ones in as ordinary a way as possible."


Dr Willmott said the only two previously identified 14th-century sites where Yersinia pestis has been identified are historically documented cemeteries in London, where the civic authorities were forced to open new emergency burial grounds to cope with the very large numbers of the urban dead.

He said: "The finding of a previously unknown and completely unexpected mass burial dating to this period in a quiet corner of rural Lincolnshire is thus far unique, and sheds light into the real difficulties faced by a small community ill-prepared to face such a devastating threat."

The archaeologist, who has been working at the site since 2011, said items found at the abbey have also shed light on the lives of those who lived there.

He said one artefact found in the excavated hospital building was a small Tau Cross pendant, which some people thought was a cure for St Anthony's fire, a term used to describe a variety of skin conditions.

He said: "While skeletons are interesting, they just represent the end of somebody's life and actually what we are interested in as archaeologists is the life they led before they died.

"One of the ways we can connect with that is through the everyday objects they left behind."


"Before we began the dig, the site was just an ordinary green field grazed by sheep for hundreds of years, but like many fields across England, as soon as you take away the turf, layers of history can be revealed by archaeology."


Dr Diana Mahoney Swales, of the University of Sheffield's Department for Lifelong Learning, who is leading the study of the bodies, said: "Once the skeletons return to the lab, we start properly learning who these people really are.

"We do this by identifying whether they are male or female, children or adults. And then we start to investigate the diseases that they may have lived through, such as metabolic diseases like rickets and scurvy, which are degenerative diseases for the skeleton.

"However, for diseases such as plague, which are lethal, we have to use ancient DNA analysis to investigate that further."

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
^^^^With mainstream news outlets coming and admitting what I have pretty much said in this thread, why is what I am writing in this thread so hard for veteran members here to believe?


Now take a look at this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/plague-pit-black-death-skeletons-lincolnshire-children-thornton-abbey-a7446556.html

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Plague pit with skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, found at abbey in Lincolnshire


Mass burial pits remain unusual from disease that killed around half of Britain's population




A plague pit containing the skeletons of 48 Black Death victims, including 21 children, has been discovered at the site of a 14th century monastery hospital.

The macabre find in Thornton Abbey, near Immingham in North Lincolnshire, was discovered by a team from Sheffield University.


The presence of such a large burial site - which included both male and female adults as well as the children - suggests the community was overwhelmed by Black Death and left unable to cope with the number of people who died, they said.

The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It devastated European populations from 1346 to 1353 and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people.


The disease is documented to have reached Lincolnshire in the spring of 1349.

The team said they sent teeth samples from the skeletons found at the Thornton Abbey site to McMaster University in Canada, where ancient DNA was successfully extracted from the tooth pulp. DNA test revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague.

Dr Hugh Willmott, Sheffield University's Department of Archaeology, said: "Despite the fact it is now estimated that up to half the population of England perished during the Black Death, multiple graves associated with the event are extremely rare in this country, and it seems local communities continued to dispose of their loved ones in as ordinary a way as possible."


Dr Willmott said the only two previously identified 14th-century sites where Yersinia pestis has been identified are historically documented cemeteries in London, where the civic authorities were forced to open new emergency burial grounds to cope with the very large numbers of the urban dead.

He said: "The finding of a previously unknown and completely unexpected mass burial dating to this period in a quiet corner of rural Lincolnshire is thus far unique, and sheds light into the real difficulties faced by a small community ill-prepared to face such a devastating threat."

The archaeologist, who has been working at the site since 2011, said items found at the abbey have also shed light on the lives of those who lived there.

He said one artefact found in the excavated hospital building was a small Tau Cross pendant, which some people thought was a cure for St Anthony's fire, a term used to describe a variety of skin conditions.

He said: "While skeletons are interesting, they just represent the end of somebody's life and actually what we are interested in as archaeologists is the life they led before they died.

"One of the ways we can connect with that is through the everyday objects they left behind."


"Before we began the dig, the site was just an ordinary green field grazed by sheep for hundreds of years, but like many fields across England, as soon as you take away the turf, layers of history can be revealed by archaeology."


Dr Diana Mahoney Swales, of the University of Sheffield's Department for Lifelong Learning, who is leading the study of the bodies, said: "Once the skeletons return to the lab, we start properly learning who these people really are.

"We do this by identifying whether they are male or female, children or adults. And then we start to investigate the diseases that they may have lived through, such as metabolic diseases like rickets and scurvy, which are degenerative diseases for the skeleton.

"However, for diseases such as plague, which are lethal, we have to use ancient DNA analysis to investigate that further."

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So here we have a plague that killed off HALF OF BRITAIN'S ENTIRE POPULATION DURING THE TIME PERIOD! YES HALF OF IT, WITH APPROXIMATELY 200 MILLION, WHICH IS A HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE FOR THE TIME PERIOD (EARLY 1300's)!


So why it so hard for members here to believe, that since there was a significant indigenous EUROPEAN Black/brown population IN EUROPE ALL THE WAY UP TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S TIME PERIOD (which was the 1700's) FROM THE NEOLITHIC, that plagues and pandemic outbreaks like the Black death killed off and destroyed many of the population centers in Britain at the time, holding the high density pops of Black British at the time period?


I mean you heard what the article said, the Black death killed off HALF OF BRITAIN'S ENTIRE POPULATION AT THE TIME! So if Britain had a significant native black British population in Britain at the time, why wouldn't the Black death have killed off and lowered the population numbers off, a vast portion of Black British, when the black death hit the British Isles or even the entirety of Europe for that matter?


And not only did plagues like the Black death hit the main cities and towns of Britain at the time, but also rural village areas, as this burial shows!


Think about what I've just said there everyone, and I would appreciate if members like Fencer and Mike chimed in!

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:

since there was a significant indigenous EUROPEAN Black/brown population IN EUROPE ALL THE WAY UP TO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S TIME PERIOD

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Originally posted by Mindovermatter:
https://www.occupycorporatism.com/scientists-claim-blue-eyes-originated-from-7000-year-old-male/

White Europeans claim their "blue eyed" ancestor's also came into form 8,000 years ago right exactly when the Vela supernova event hit our solar system and smothered our planet's surface with high degrees of cosmic radiation projectile bombardment and large amounts of solar flares.

SO THERE YOU GO! White Eurasians and White Europeans are the result of the Vela supernova event showering earth with high degrees of cosmic radiation and causing massive amounts of mutations en masse at the same time.

And in this case, these mutations resulted in blue/light eyes, and light hair and skin as found in modern White Europeans and White Eurasian groups TODAY!

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Originally posted by Mike111:
Europe was never densely populated by Blacks.

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Originally posted by Mike111:
The African had of course been in Germany for more than 40,000 years, but the oldest Black skeletons found so far, are only from 2,600 B.C.

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Indus era at least 8,000 years old; ended because of weaker monsoon

Experts have found evidence of the Indus Valley Civilization being at least 8,000 years old and not 5,500 years old.



[b]Due to a recent revelation made by scientists from IIT-Kharagpur and Archaeological Survey of India, time has arrived to rewrite history textbooks.


A group of researchers in India have used carbon dating techniques on animal remains and pottery fragments to conclude that the Indus Valley settlements could be 8,000 years old—2,500 years older than previously believed. That could make the Indus Valley settlements, which were spread across Pakistan and northern India, even older than the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations.

What’s more, the researchers have found evidence of a pre-Harappan civilization that existed for at least 1,000 years before this. As per a report published in Times of India, this may force a global rethink on the timelines of the so-called ‘cradles of civilization’. “We have recovered perhaps the oldest pottery from the civilization.


We used a technique called ‘optically stimulated luminescence’ to date pottery shards of the Early Mature Harappan time to nearly 6,000 years ago and the cultural levels of pre-Harappan Hakra phase as far back as 8,000 years,” said Anindya Sarkar, head of the department of geology and geophysics at IIT-Kgp. Archaeological studies had earlier suggested that the civilization was centered around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan, and Lothal, Dholavira, and Kalibangan in India.


In recent years excavation at Rakhigarhi and few other places indicate that the civilization probably was more expansive than thought before.

Whatever may be the extent most Harappan settlements grew in the floodplains of river systems including those of the Indus or now defunct Ghaggar-Hakra (mythical river Saraswati?).



(Left) Map of Northwest India and Pakistan showing the locations of main Harappan settlements. (Right) Panoramic view of the excavation of mature Harappan stage at Bhirrana.


They took their dig to an unexplored site, Bhirrana — and ended up unearthing something much bigger.


The excavation also yielded large quantities of animal remains like bones, teeth, horn cores of cow, goat, deer and antelope, which were put through Carbon 14 analysis to decipher antiquity and the climatic conditions in which the civilization flourished, said Arati Deshpande Mukherjee of Deccan College, which helped analyse the finds along with Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.

Our study shows that the pre-Harappan humans started inhabiting this area along the Ghaggar-Hakra rivers in a climate that was favorable for human settlement and agriculture. The monsoon was much stronger between 9000 years and 7000 years from now and probably fed these rivers making them mightier with vast floodplains,” – Deshpande Mukherjee.

While the earlier phases were represented by pastoral and early village farming communities, the mature Harappan settlements were highly urbanized with organised cities, and a much developed material and craft culture.


They also had regular trade with Arabia and Mesopotamia. The Late Harappan phase witnessed large-scale de-urbanization, drop in population, abandonment of established settlements, lack of basic amenities, violence and even the disappearance of the Harappan script, the researchers say.

THE STUDY REVEALED THAT MONSOON STARTED WEAKENING 7,000 YEARS AGO BUT, SURPRISINGLY, THE CIVILIZATION DID NOT DISAPPEAR.

The Indus Valley people were very resolute and flexible and continued to evolve even in the face of declining monsoon. The people shifted their crop patterns from large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species like rice in the latter part.


As the yield diminished, the organised large storage system of the Mature Harappan period gave way to more individual household-based crop processing and storage systems that acted as a catalyst for the de-urbanisation of the civilization rather than an abrupt collapse, they say.

Source: Oxygen isotope in archaeological bioapatites from India: Implications to climate change and decline of Bronze Age Harappan civilization.

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Severe droughts explain the mysterious fall of the Maya

[b]We might finally know why the Maya abandoned their impressive limestone cities about 1,000 years ago

When the Spanish conquistadores sailed for Central America in 1517, their goal was to vanquish the resident Maya civilisation. But the colonists arrived to find that much of their work had been done for them.


The Maya’s towering limestone cities – a classic feature of one of the ancient world’s most advanced societies – were already being reclaimed by the jungle.


The question of how the Maya met their end is one of history's most enduring mysteries. The Maya people survived; they even managed to stage a long resistance to European rule.


But by the time the Spanish made landfall, the political and economic power which had erected the region's iconic pyramids, and had at one time sustained a population of some two million people, had vanished.


The first Maya sites were built during the first millennium BC, and the civilisation reached its height around AD600. (In the chronology of Mesoamerica, the Maya sit between the earlier Olmec and later Aztec civilisations).


Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of ancient Maya cities, most of which are spread across southern Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Belize and Guatemala.


It’s likely that still more Maya ruins lie hidden beneath the region’s thick tropical forest.


After about 200 years of serious archaeological study, we know enough about the Maya to be suitably impressed. Their distinctive art and architecture prove that these were master craftspeople.


The Maya were also intellectually advanced. They had a strong grasp of mathematics and astronomy, which they used to align their pyramids and temples with the precession of planets and the solar equinoxes. And they used the only known written script in Mesoamerica, a bizarre-looking set of characters known as Maya hieroglyphs.


The marvels the Maya left behind have earned them an enduring mystique. But the way the civilisation met its end is every bit as curious.


Let’s start with what we know. Around AD850, after centuries of prosperity and dominance, the Maya began to abandon their great cities, one after another. In less than 200 years, the civilisation had slumped to a fraction of its former glory. There would be later isolated resurgences, but the grandeur of the Maya’s heyday was gone forever.



Apart from its dramatic scale, what makes the Maya collapse so striking is that, despite decades of study, archaeologists still cannot agree on what caused it. As with the Roman Empire, there probably wasn’t one single culprit for the Maya’s downfall. But the nature of their decline leads some researchers to believe that the Maya civilisation fell victim to a major catastrophe – one able to topple city after city in its wake.


There are abundant theories about what finished off the Maya.


There are the old favourites – invasion, civil war, collapsing trade routes – but ever since the first Central American ancient climate records were pieced together in the early 1990s, one theory has become particularly popular: that the Maya civilisation was ultimately doomed by a period of severe climate change.


In the centuries immediately before the Maya collapse – the so-called “Classical Age” between about AD250 and 800 – the civilisation boomed. Cities flourished and harvests were good.


Climate records (which mostly come from the analysis of cave formations) show that during this time the Maya area had received relatively high rainfall. But the same records show that, starting in about AD820, the region was ravaged by 95 years of punctuated droughts, some of which lasted for decades.


ever since these droughts were first identified, researchers have noticed a striking correlation between their timing and that of the Maya collapse: most of the Classic Maya cities fell between AD850 and 925 – largely coincident with the century of drought.


And while a simple correlation isn’t enough to close the case, the tight fit between the droughts and the downfall leads many experts to believe that the 9th Century climate shift might somehow have caused the Maya’s demise.


But attractive as the drought explanation is, one piece of evidence has been standing in its way. Because, while most Maya cities declined as the climate dried, not all did.


The Maya cities which fell during the 9th Century droughts were mostly located in the southern portion of their territory, in modern day Guatemala and Belize. In the Yucatan peninsula to the north, however, the Maya civilisation not only survived through these droughts, it then began to flourish.


While the southern Maya civilisation began to disintegrate, the north enjoyed relative prosperity, with the rise of a number of thriving urban centres. These included one of the greatest of all Maya cities, Chichen Itza (one of the world’s “New Seven Wonders”).


This northern resurgence flies against the drought theory of the Maya’s demise: if the south was permanently crippled by the climate shift, critics argue, then why wasn’t the north?


Researchers have proposed various explanations for this north-south discrepancy, but so far no one theory has won out. Recently, however, a new discovery has gone some way towards resolving this enduring paradox.





Almost none of the Maya’s written records, which once numbered in the thousands, survived past colonial times (on the order of Catholic priests, the Spanish burned Maya books wholesale - only four are now known to exist). Instead, to determine the times that ancient Maya cities thrived, researchers rely on calendar inscriptions on stone monuments, stylistic analysis of the Maya’s ornate ceramics, and radiocarbon dates from organic materials.


Earlier studies had already determined the approximate ages of the main urban centres in the northern Maya civilisation; it was these that had revealed that the north had endured the 9th Century droughts.


However until recently this haul of data had never been gathered together in a single study. Doing so is important, because it allows the northern Maya region to be viewed as a whole, helping researchers to identify overarching trends in its rise and fall.


Now, in a study published in December, archaeologists from the US and the UK have brought together for the first time all of the calculated ages for urban centres in the northern Maya lands. These comprise about 200 dates from sites across the Yucatan peninsula, half obtained from stone calendar inscriptions and half from radiocarbon dating.


The researchers could then construct a broad picture of what times the northern Maya cities had been active, and the times when they each might have fallen into decline.


What the team found significantly changes our understanding of when, and perhaps even how the Maya civilisation met its end. Contrary to previous belief, the north had suffered a decline during a time of drought - in fact, it had suffered two of them.


The number of stone calendar inscriptions declined in times of drought (Credit: Image Source/Alamy)



There was a 70% decline in stone calendar inscriptions in the second half of the 9th Century.


This same pattern of decline is also echoed in radiocarbon dates across the northern Maya region, which indicate that wooden construction also dwindled during the same time period. Importantly, this is the time that the droughts are believed to have caused the collapse of the Maya civilisation in the south – evidently the north didn’t come through these droughts unscathed after all.


The researchers believe that this waning of creative activity shows that political and societal collapse was underway in the north. The north certainly fared better than the south during the 9th Century, but these new findings suggest that the region nevertheless suffered a significant decline.


This northern decline had previously escaped detection mostly due to the subtle nature of the evidence: a decline in construction, even one as large as this, is hard to spot without the comprehensive, region-wide analysis provided by the new study.


The northern decline of the 9th Century is an intriguing new detail in the Maya’s story, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter it - after all, we already knew that the northern Maya had survived past the 9th Century droughts (Chichen Itza and other centres thrived until well into the 10th Century).


But the second decline the team identified does change our understanding of the Maya’s story. After a short recovery during the 10th Century (which, interestingly, was coincident with an increase in rainfall), the researchers noticed another slump in construction at numerous sites across the northern Maya territory: stone carving and other building activity seems to have fallen by almost half between AD1000 and 1075. What’s more, just like the crisis 200 years earlier, the researchers discovered that this 11th Century Maya decline also took place against a backdrop of severe drought.


And not just any drought. The ones in the 9th Century had certainly been severe. But the 11th Century brought the worst drought that the region had seen for fully 2,000 years - a “megadrought”.



The 11th Century Maya decline occurred during a period of severe drought (Credit: YAY Media AS/Alamy)


After a short recovery there was another slump in construction in the north – against a backdrop of severe drought.


Climate records show that rainfall diminished dramatically for the best part of a century, between around AD1020 and 1100 - a snug fit with the archaeologically derived dates for the collapse of the northern Maya. One correlation doesn’t mean much on its own. But find two, and even sceptics might start to whisper “causation”.



The 11th Century megadrought had been implicated in the fall of the northern Maya before, but the dating techniques used had given ambiguous ages, making it hard to tell if the timings of the two events really did overlap. The comprehensive analysis published in the December study lets us say with much greater certainty that climate change was contemporaneous with not one, but two devastating periods of Maya decline.


If the first wave of droughts had finished off the Maya in the south, it looks like the second wave may have brought on their demise in the north.


After this second wave of droughts there was to be no real recovery for the Maya. Chichen Itza and most of the other important centres in the north would never rise again. There would be small but noteworthy exceptions - such as the northern city of Mayapan which flourished from the 13th to 15th centuries - but these would never rival the size and complexity of the Classic Maya cities. In many ways, the 11th Century was the Maya’s last gasp.


With these findings, it looks even more likely that climate change played a significant role in the Maya’s downfall.


But how?


The Maya were highly dependent on crops


Most archaeological explanations for the collapse involve agriculture. The Maya, like all large civilisations, were heavily dependent on crops for their economic might - and of course to sustain their vast workforce.


The simplest explanation for the Maya’s fall is that year-upon-year of low crop yields, brought on by the droughts, may have gradually diminished the Maya’s political influence, eventually leading to full-on societal disintegration.


But even advocates of the drought hypothesis admit that the picture is bound to be more nuanced than that.


“We know that there was already increased warfare and socio-political instability throughout the Maya area prior to the 9th Century droughts,” says Julie Hoggarth at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who co-led December’s climate analysis.


Inter-city conflict is a pretty good way to break up a civilisation too; it’s possible that the Maya just fought themselves apart. But that still leaves the question of the droughts, and those well fitting dates.


Perhaps, then, it was a mixture of the two. As food stocks shrank during the dry decades, competition for resources would probably have become even more intense, perhaps eventually reaching a tipping point which caused the ancient Maya civilisation to fracture irreparably.


It's possible that the Maya just fought themselves apart (Credit: JORDI CAMÍ/Alamy)


But there’s at least one other explanation that doesn’t require any warfare. It may not have been the Maya’s dark side that doomed them, but their talents. Because, while the Maya were famously great craftsmen, but they were also environmental sculptors.


To grow enough food to feed their millions, the Maya dug huge systems of canals, sometimes hundreds of miles across, which allowed them to drain and elevate the infertile wetlands which cover much of the Maya heartland, producing new arable land (some archaeologists call these “floating gardens”). The Maya also cleared huge tracts of forest, both for agriculture and to make room for their cities.


Some scholars think that the Maya’s skilled manipulation of their environment could have had a hand in their eventual collapse, by somehow worsening the impacts of natural climate change. For example, some scholars think that deforestation to clear land for agriculture might have exacerbated localised drying effects, leading to more significant agricultural losses during drought.


A more indirect consequence of their agricultural prowess might simply have been that it allowed the population to grow too large, which might have increased their vulnerability to an extended food shortage, and therefore reduced their resistance to a drier climate.


Mesoamerica’s famous civilisation mysteriously fell about 1,000 years ago (Credit: Age fotostock/Alamy)


Whatever the reason – or reasons – for the Maya’s collapse, we do know something about the fate of the people who were left to face its aftermath. Starting around AD1050, the Maya took to the road.


They abandoned the inland regions where their ancestors had thrived, and made their way in droves towards the Caribbean coast, or to other sources of water, such as the lakes and sinkholes which occasionally punctuate the dense green of the Maya’s former territory.


The exodus of the Maya people may have been motivated by hunger. If the crops had indeed failed following the 9th and 11th Century droughts, relocating nearer water might have made sense, either to access seafood or to take advantage of the wetter land near the sea. Whatever the reason, moisture was clearly on their minds.


But then again, that had always been the case. One of the duties of a Maya ruler was to commune with the gods to ensure a wet year and good harvests.


At sites across the Maya world, archaeologists have dredged up human bones from the bottom of lakes and sinkholes - thought to be doorways to the underworld: grim evidence that the people resorted to sacrifice to appease their deities. When the rains were good, and the civilisation blossomed, it must have seemed like their prayers were being answered.

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Kalash women in Pakistan's remote mountains. The Kalash people's way of life is under threat from climate change.

Ancient Kalash People in Remote Pakistan Hit by Climate Change, Deforestation

The culture, rituals and existence of the small Kalash community—living in three remote valleys of Chitral district in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountain range in northwest Pakistan—are under threat from various factors associated with climate change.

There are believed to be only about 4,000 Kalash living in this region. With their light complexions and rituals centred on a worship of nature, some say they are the descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great, which invaded the area in the 4th century BC.

“Kalashas are like a museum of this country and must be protected,” says Shahigul, a Kalash community leader in the Bumburet valley, close to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.


Erratic Monsoon


“In the past, our culture and rituals were under threat from outsiders, but now we are much more worried about our future due to recurring flashfloods in our valleys,” she says.

Sudden downpours and an increasingly erratic monsoon—together with the ever-present danger of earthquakes—are taking their toll on the Kalash, who are dependent on the land for their livelihood.

The melting of glaciers in the Hindu Kush mountain range and sudden surges of water in mountain valleys is another threat.

“We lost our houses, crops, orchards and livestock last year due to flooding, and now there is little left for us,” Shahigul says.

Locals say the climate in their long, steep valleys is changing. They say that deforestation is another reason for the increased occurrence of flash floods in the region, with outsiders coming in to chop down trees.

Changing Cycles, Different Weather

Bajur Khan, another senior figure in the Kalash community, says the 2015 flooding—which also destroyed centuries-old walnut trees—was particularly bad.

“Almost eighty percent of my arable land was washed away,” he says. “I managed to rescue just two forty-kilogram sacks of maize, instead of the usual thirty sacks I used to collect each year. We are scared about the future and want to leave the area.”

The Kalash, and the mountain valleys they live in, were once a magnet for local and foreign tourists, providing income that helped these unique communities to survive.

But now there are few visitors in the area – due to changes in climate and to security issues associated with the Taliban and conflict in nearby Afghanistan.

The Kalash have fought hard to retain their customs and their special way of life. Although some have become Muslim, most still follow animistic religious traditions.

The women also continue to wear their intricate, colourful costumes, and there is a lively round of festivals, with music and dancing, red wine and organic food. Funerals in the Kalash community are particularly lavish affairs.

Infrastructure Repair

The Kalash say local government officials have colluded with timber merchants who come to chop down trees. And they say that little has been done to repair roads and bridges destroyed in the floods.

Government officials say the Pakistan army has helped repair some infrastructure. They also say the flash floods of 2015 were due to cloudbursts, and that deforestation was not responsible for the damage caused.

But Amir Muhammad Khan, programme manager at Focus Humanitarian Assistance, an international organisation that supports emergency relief following natural disasters, says weather patterns in Chitral have completely changed in recent years.

“The patterns of the rains has altered, with sudden monsoon rainfalls in the summer months,” he says. “The growing cycle of crops and fruit has also changed. We are seeing very different weather.”

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Archaeologists uncover new clues to Maya collapse

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—Using the largest set of radiocarbon dates ever obtained from a single Maya site, archaeologists have developed a high-precision chronology that sheds new light on patterns leading up to the two major collapses of the ancient civilization.

Archaeologists have long puzzled over what caused what is known as the Classic Maya collapse in the ninth century A.D., when many of the ancient civilization's cities were abandoned. More recent investigations have revealed that the Maya also experienced an earlier collapse in the second century A.D.—now called the Preclassic collapse—that is even more poorly understood.


University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues suggest in a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that both collapses followed similar trajectories, with multiple waves of social instability, warfare and political crises leading to the rapid fall of many city centers.

The findings are based on a highly refined chronology developed by Inomata and his colleagues using an unprecedented 154 radiocarbon dates from the archaeological site of Ceibal in Guatemala, where the team has worked for over a decade.

While more general chronologies might suggest that the Maya collapses occurred gradually, this new, more precise chronology indicates more complex patterns of political crises and recoveries leading up to each collapse


"What we found out is that those two cases of collapse (Classic and Preclassic) follow similar patterns," said Inomata, the paper's lead author and a professor in the School of Anthropology in the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "It's not just a simple collapse, but there are waves of collapse. First, there are smaller waves, tied to warfare and some political instability, then comes the major collapse, in which many centers got abandoned. Then there was some recovery in some places, then another collapse."

Using radiocarbon dating and data from ceramics and highly controlled archaeological excavations, the researchers were able to establish the refined chronology of when population sizes and building construction increased and decreased at Ceibal.



Archaeologists excavate the royal palace of Ceibal, which was burned during the Classic Maya collapse in the ninth century. Credit: Takeshi Inomata/University of Arizona

While the findings may not solve the mystery of why exactly the Maya collapses occurred, they are an important step toward better understanding how they unfolded.

"It's really, really interesting that these collapses both look very similar, at very different time periods," said Melissa Burham, one of three UA anthropology graduate students who co-authored the paper. "We now have a good understanding of what the process looked like, that potentially can serve as a template for other people to try to see if they have a similar pattern at their (archaeological) sites in the same area."

Inomata and his UA colleagues—anthropology professor Daniela Triadan and students Burham, Jessica MacLellan and Juan Manuel Palomo—worked with collaborators at Ibaraki University, Naruto University of Education and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan, and with Guatemalan archaeologists and students.

Radiocarbon dating was done at Paleo Laboratory Company in Japan and at the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory in the UA Department of Physics.

"Radiocarbon dating has been used for a long time, but now we're getting to an interesting period because it's getting more and more precise," said Inomata, who also is an Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the UA. "We're getting to the point where we can get to the interesting social patterns because the chronology is refined enough, and the dating is precise enough.

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