This is probably related to the (somewhat shortsightedly named) 4.2 kiloyear event when climate change and aridity caused the collapse of multiple long standing civilizations like the Egyptian and Indus valley civilizations:
Apparently, the "before present" time scale is commonly used in archaeology and geology, and uses an epoch date of Jan 1, 1950. And there're two reasons for this: radiocarbon dating was first standardized in the 1950s, using a reference sample from 1950; and after the 1950s, widespread nuclear testing made radiocarbon dating inaccurate.
It's actually less arbitrary and shortsighted than it seems. Future civilizations are going to face a discontinuity in the archaeological record, and it'll be roughly at the Before Present epoch date.
> Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air. Low-background steel is so-called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination. This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides.
Apparently one source of low-background steel are ships built before 1945, especially military ships as they are large and can be in use for decades. The US navy has scraped a few old ships for this use and there are theories that some WW2 wrecks are being salvaged from the ocean bed for this purpose, but there is no conclusive evidence.
And not just before 1945: lead is used for radiation shielding, but freshly-mined lead is slightly radioactive itself... shipments of lead that were mined 2000 years ago and sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean since then, much less so: https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100415/full/news.2010.186.h...
Not a lot globally and at this timescale. Radionuclides is about it.
Nuclear bombs put energy and radioactive particulates into the atmosphere. The effects of the radioactive particulates are fairly well understood. The amount of energy from even the largest bombs is negligible at those scales.
The zero year for the "Before Present(BP)" timescale is 1950. BP was used by carbon dating scientists first and 1950 was a nice round date a few years before the year when carbon dating[1] no longer worked due to atmospheric nuclear testing.
Since collapse is getting trendy, we get a few articles and videos about previous occurrences. That said I'd be more interested in the aftermath and rebuild (recover/coma) period after that.
I"m into that topic before it became mainstream, long term /r/collapse reader.
To be honest, I don't think there will be a rebuild after this one. No water, no food and wet bulb temperatures over 35 °C for many hours a day, good look under this conditions. Maybe some smaller groups will find some sweat spot to survive in, but large scale civilizations I doubt that.
That is the default path we're on. All the models for things not going that way involve the emissions rate plummeting over the next decade and then going negative for several decades.
Essentially the IPCC and scientists in general have baked in the assumption to the models that we are smart enough to avoid collapse by changing our behavior. TBD.
Or to put it in P.G./HN jargon, (our current) civilization is "default dead" if we stay above 10Gt/year for the latter half of the century.
Yes, if no action is taken against climate change and our annual CO2 emissions rise because the living standard in India and China rises then collapse of civilization is very likely. Depending on our determination it is also possible for no human to survive climate change. 9°C warming might be far off but it certainly isn't impossible, thanks to feedback loops and ignorance.
The reality will probably look a bit more rosy if we get our act together and do manage to reduce CO2 emissions, at least I hope this will happen.
He's far from being the first one to claim that. That's where doing nothing leads us, and so far, we (as in, the society) seem incapable of tackling this problem. It's already too late to stop it, and we seem incapable to contain it as well.
For the overview of the argument, I'd recommend a paper called "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy". Direct link: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
"Until now, the Temple Culture was thought to have centered on the worship of a mother goddess, but Malone thinks it was more of a clubhouse culture, focused on ritual and feasting but where food—rather than a deity—was revered."
(The word'Temple' has for too long been a placeholder for 'we don't know.')
> Until now, the Temple Culture was thought to have centered on the worship of a mother goddess, but Malone thinks it was more of a clubhouse culture, focused on ritual and feasting but where food—rather than a deity—was revered."
>
> (The word'Temple' has for too long been a placeholder for 'we don't know.')
This reminded me of The Motel of the Mysteries[1] where modern-day objects and franchises are similarly turned into temples and objects of worship or religious tools.
When we look back on past civilizations we do it with a relatively slim understanding on what, why, or how they did things besides the basic drives and needs of life. The further back in time, the more we have to "guess" what we're looking at. So usually we just assume that so far back in time the civilizations must have been simple enough that their main focuses (besides... living) were religion or war. It's sort of a running joke among archaeologists that when something is unexplained you immediately attribute it to religion/ritual. [0] Sometimes it's hard to imagine that once in a while, people many millennia ago might have behaved just like modern humans since we haven't changed that much in the meantime (biology/evolution). [1] [2]
I really think we didn't change that much in depth. Just reading Marcus Aurelius quotes gives a hint. That said cultural context seems to matter deeply too. Some guy told me that no matter how educated they were, a high % of migrants will become impatient, selfish and violent after a month of struggle. All in all you'd have to factor in their lifestyle. Small village in a calm and abundant enough area ? probably very similar to us. You can see african tribes living in isolated places.. they're not different. They sit around, care for young ones, listen and rebel against elders, clean and cook. They have near zero fancy distractions though (they make their own I suppose).
I love that you spoke to this. It seems to me that there's as particularly strong aversion to acknowledging how much we don't know when it comes to talking about these things.
The "if we dont know its part of a ritual/temple" joke was being told the first class in archaeology and it was repeated thoroughly. Everyone knows it's just a convenient placeholder.
> "The decisive blow may have been an unknown catastrophe that occurred around 2350 BC, a period during which, according to tree ring analysis, the whole region suffered a catastrophic climate event—possibly a dust cloud caused by a volcanic eruption."
Wouldn't this leave some sort of trace? A layer in the dirt? Even under water?
I'm a bit disappointed - this being the crux of the theory - this was left open. Intentionally?
There is a known dramatic climate shift that occurred around that timeframe that is responsible for several civilisation collapses. [0]
However, the author points out that they lack the preservation of proxies such as what you've pointed out. They were analysing in a region where ecological change occurs frequently.
Well, with that being said, what I read, at least to some extent, implied this society had a (heavy) hand in their own undoing. But if the area is known to be in flux, then maybe it was simply another round in that cycle? Or not?
That context, to me, should be stated plain and obvious right upfront. Caveats. They matter.
>Width between the tracks extends about 140 centimeters, but not in all instances. The tracks measured at the San Gwann site in Malta are said to be half a meter in depth, making them the deepest to be found.
Wow. Our rail gauge is 142 centimeters. And half a meter deep? (Goes looking into Roman cart technology)... about the same!
> These rims had their outer side convex, inner side concave or flat, with a thickness of about 15 mm., a width of between 35 to 45mm., and a diameter from 1001 to 1193 mm.20
>The historical tendency to place the wheels of horse-drawn vehicles approximately 5 feet (1,500 mm) apart probably derives from the width needed to fit a carthorse in between the shafts.
While moderns tend to think there's not much path-dependency in specifying axle-widths for wheeled vehicles, between rut tracks (mant remarkably persistent) and gate widths, constraints can be strongly imposed.
Rail guages have also varied fairly considerably, though again, standards come to be imposed with time. Reguaging rolling stock is slow
Reflecting on ancient civilizations is always exhilarating—a way to connect with where we’ve been as a species, and where we may eventually go. I wonder how life must have felt subjectively from the perspective of someone without the lenses (and weight) of history and science, without knowing where they are in space and time (on a planetary and cosmic scale, as we do). Yet there are so many aspects of day-to-day human life and society that never seem to change.
Stories of societal/environmental reckonings are also a good reminder that civilizational resilience is a worthy goal, if for no other reason than future generations can experience the existential “enoughness” of eating olives in the Mediterranean sun (and such).
It is worth pointing out that most anthropologists disagree with Jared Diamond's thesis. Notably, the consensus view is that Greenland, Easter Island, and Mayan city states were not driven to collapse primarily because of ecological effects.
Greenland's collapse was largely driven by a shift in northern trade routes and Greenland lost its cash crop export (ivory). Easter Island does not appear to have undergone any sort of collapse until after European contact. And the Mayan collapse is actually completely backwards from how it should progress if climate was the major factor: there was a shift in power from the more fertile highlands region to what was previously the relatively backwards arid Yucatan region (Cichen Itza, in the northern Yucatan, didn't start thriving until after the southern regions were in dramatic collapse).
Usually these kinds of articles avoid the obvious fact, that ancient civilizations were based on plunder and exploitation, and that eventually you run out of places to plunder or your victims adapt and fight back. This was surprising because it seems like that wasn’t the case.
From the article I doubt that this population was based on "plunder and exploitation".
Apparently the scientists reconstructed their diet from skeletal remains, and you'd expect your standard marauder types to feed more on meat, since meat packs more calories (and satisfaction) per kilo.
The scientists say they didn't find many signs of violent deaths (in contrast to South American sites) and collapsed without signs of an exodus. Also the location of the island can't have been that convenient for seafarers of the period. On top of that, they didn't do much fishing at all, further pointing to a lack of maritime ambition.
I'd say the onset of civilization is marked by the ability to organize politically and amass resources without resorting to whole-sale plunder.
What makes the Maltese Temple Culture a "Civilization" is the higher population density and their efforts to bend the land to their will, leaving traces that endure for millenia.
That's the case for some ancient civilizations (it's definitely one of the more plausible entries on the great big list of reasons Rome fell, say), but not all.
> Hancock is a crank that thinks Atlantis existed in Antarctica.
Hancock claims to have been misrepresented about this by the BBC in an interview many years ago, he explains it here [0]. I think if you asked him today, he would say the most likely location for the ruins of Atlantis is somewhere off the coast between southwest Spain [1] and the Celtic Shelf [2]. While certainly outside the mainstream, that is not an unreasonable hypothesis. In my experience, when you start to really research ancient civilizations you often find the mainstream view a bit unsatisfactory. In searching for alternate explanations however, you quickly end up in the land of fringe theories. Hancock often presents these ideas in a more favorable light than what the evidence supports, but there’s also some good history mixed in and he doesn’t go off into ancient aliens territory like many of the people who write about these topics.
> Hancock is a crank that thinks Atlantis existed in Antarctica.
To be fair, it must be pointed out that the linked article, though hosted at the domain of the crank Hancock, was written by another author. That other author, however, is a legal translator by profession and only decided to dabble in Maltese archeology, so she is hardly any better.
He's not a crank, he's a journalist. Its his job as a journalist to generate interest in the subject - and in that regard, Hancock has done a lot to bring people into the subject who otherwise would've been ignoring it for the authorities ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event
https://phys.org/news/2014-02-decline-bronze-age-megacities-... https://www.livescience.com/20614-collapse-mythical-river-ci...