Scientists debate role climate change plays in creating civilizations

Submitted by coldrum on Friday, 14 July 2006 Page Views: 775

One of archaeology’s "big questions" is explaining the origins of civilization. In anthropology, "civilization" has a technical definition.

To qualify as a civilization, a society must have all or most of the following characteristics: cities with large populations; a hierarchical social organization, with a king, pharaoh or president at the top of the organizational chart; an economy based on agriculture; monumental architecture; and a system of record-keeping.

The earliest civilizations arose in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and northern China. Based on this definition, there were no indigenous civilizations in the Ohio Valley. And the arrival of European civilization derailed any chance of one developing.

Various theories have been proposed to explain how this social complexity developed and why it developed in some areas and not others, but archaeologists and historians have not formulated any one satisfying explanation.

Nick Brooks, a climate-change researcher at the University of East Anglia in England, offers his idea in the latest issue of Quaternary International.

"The emergence of complex societies coincided with or followed a period of increased aridity," which began 8,000 years ago but intensified periodically in subsequent millennia, he said.

In this view, global climate change caused the profound social changes that have been referred to as the "urban revolution."

Brooks states that during large-scale droughts, people would have been forced to concentrate in places where water was available.

By Bradley T. Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.

More: Columbus Dispatch.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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