Climate change was responsible for the collapse of humanities first major steps towards civilisation says new research carried out by archaeologists and leading scientists.
A series of droughts that lasted 200 years, between the 21st and 20th century BC have been the suggested probable cause for the rapid decline of a great Bronze Age urban civilisations of Pakistan and India.
The research was carried out by Cambridge and Indias, Banaras Hindu University and correlates with drought evidence found by other scientists from the bottom of the Arabian sea and the Gulf of Oman.
“Our evidence suggests that it was the most intense period of drought – probably due to frequent monsoon failure – in the 5000 year-long period we have examined,” said University of Cambridge Palaeoclimate scientist, Professor David Hodell.
The Indus Valley civilisation – which had some city populations in the hundreds of thousands lasted for 500 years, then went into rapid decline
It’s now thought likely that the droughts at around that time were partly responsible for the collapse not only of the Indus Valley Civilisation, but also of the ancient Akkadian Empire, Old Kingdom Egypt and possibly Early Bronze Age civilizations in Greece.
The scientists studying the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization obtained their new evidence from a dried-up lake bed near India’s capital New Delhi which is just 40 miles east of the eastern edge of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
They detected the climatic conditions by examining isotopic evidence from the calcium carbonate in the shells of snails that had lived between 6500 years ago and 1500 years ago.
“Archaeologists are really in a unique position when investigating climate change in the past, because we hopefully get to see what people were doing in the ‘before, during and after’ phases. We therefore get an opportunity to investigate how ancient populations responded to climatic and environmental change. How did they cope with periods of water stress? Were their existing ways of life resilient? Were they forced to adapt in order to survive, and if so, precisely what did they do,” said University of Cambridge archaeologist, Dr. Cameron Petrie.
“For the Indus populations, it looks as though living in large groups became untenable, and it was much more sustainable to live in smaller groups. This is of course a huge simplification of a complex process, but this transformation is the underlying dynamic.
“By investigating responses to environmental pressures and threats in the past, we can hopefully learn from the past to engage with the public, and the relevant governmental and administrative bodies to be more pro-active in issues such as the management and administration of water supply, the balance of urban and rural development, and even the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the future,” said Dr. Petrie.
The new research is reported in the journal Geology.
Source: The Independent
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