Severe climate change was the primary driver in the development of civilisation, according to new research by the University of East Anglia.
The early civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, China and northern South America were founded between 6000 and 4000 years ago when global climate changes, driven by natural fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit, caused a weakening of monsoon systems resulting in increasingly arid conditions. These first large urban, state-level societies emerged because diminishing resources forced previously transient people into close proximity in areas where water, pasture and productive land was still available.
In a presentation to the BA Festival of Science on September 7, Dr Nick Brooks challenged existing views of how and why civilisation arose. He argued that the earliest civilisations developed largely as a by-product of adaptation to climate change and were the products of hostile environments.
“Civilisation did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban, ‘civilized’ societies,” said Dr Brooks.
“On the contrary, what we tend to think of today as ‘civilisation’ was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilisation was a last resort – a means of organising society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions.”
Dr Brooks said: “Having been forced into civilized communities as a last resort, people found themselves faced with increased social inequality, greater violence in the form of organised conflict, and at the mercy of self-appointed elites who used religious authority and political ideology to bolster their position. These models of government are still with us today, and we may understand them better by understanding how civilisation arose by accident as a result of the last great global climatic upheaval.”
An interesting take which rolls alienation back to well before industrial society. I wish I could have heard the post-lecture discussion.
Of course, moving the discussion to modern times, you have to reflect on what happens as the quest for scarce goods focuses on oil — as much as water.
I thought it was Bush’s fault.
This does not mean that we shouldn’t be concerned about current climate change.
It must have been global warming caused by deforestation – due to campfire and home heating by burning wood!
I believe climate change is cyclical… yes we are adding to it by burning dinosaurs in the tanks of our cars… but the earth and its cycles are greater than anything we can do (long term that is).
Don’t get me wrong… a nuclear winter would certainly change our environment… but eventually… things would come back to “normal” at least on a planetary time scale.
Agree fully with #2.
We are supposed to be an adaptive species,..
THAt is how we have survived for so long in the first place.
But we have to get away from NOT adapting.
Large groups are not the way to survive. they tend to die out, ask London and Europe about Plagues.
Actually on a geologic time scale we haven’t been around but a couple minutes and as a whole humans are only decent at adapting because we have the ability to build and create. As an animal species without these abilities we would have been gone a long long time ago and actually were nearly wiped out in our early evolution by a drastic climate change that we believe was brought on by a Super-volcano eruption.
Yes as a species we need to be more responsible for what we are doing to the environment. As a whole I think the CO we are putting into the air has very little to do with our current global warming trend that’s not to say we shouldn’t put a stop to it. The problem is even if we stopped all of it this very day it would not stop the Earth from going into this next global cycle which will likely lead to an ice age in the next century or two. Something very few people think about when it comes to pollution is heat pollution. Any time you work something you generate heat and humans are fantastic at generating heat from heating our homes to the engines of our cars we waste so much heat energy it’s amazing that no one has contributed it to part of the global warming trend.
That said the sun is the biggest contributor and at this moment it’s hotter then any time we can determine in our geologic history. Even Mars is currently in a global warming trend.
Mars is currently in a global warming trend.
Interesting, MacBandit – where can I read more about this?
That said the sun is the biggest contributor and at this moment it’s hotter then any time we can determine in our geologic history. Even Mars is currently in a global warming trend.
Comment by MacBandit — 9/9/2006 @ 9:32 am
See? It is Bushes fault. Don’t go a blaming George H. and Barbara Bush. It is all the fault of their sun. That boy is so hot, which is how he bagged a cutie like the First Lady.
They made the cities and called it progress, they made machines of war bigger and deadlier and called it progress and devised fiendish methods of mind control (marketing/advertising, etc) and called that progress as well.
Real progress is a lakeside domain, temperate, with an open house, young girls wearing naught but three frond grass skirts serving me iced drinks and no electricity allowed except to power the ice machine. Now that, I contend, is progress.
10,
But realty agents call that water front property, and charge ALOT more, even tho its a flood plain.
Whatever… I doubt that people came together by acident. If you’re a evolution type person, it should be clear that a group of individuals has a better chance than one individual, or one family. So that at least would be the beginning of nomads. If someone found out how to grow grains or found food plentiful in an area they would probably stay. Now, I can believe that cultivating different foods would be a forced reaction to over eating of an areas natural supply.
Then again, the middle east was supposed to have forests before the car and chain saw came along and help Solomon Temple to God, oh wait maybe that’s a little out of order. Either way it’s the fault of evil cars and chain saws, and guns they are the one’s making everything bad. Don’t you wish for the days of Attila the Hun, when everyone just had a bow and horse. Ha, Ha with the Leftist lose and bringing sustainable development to a nation near you, not only won’t you have a horse, you won’t have food, gas, heat or a roof over your head. That is unless you’re one of the more equal of the equals, the Pigs have taken over.
Yea, Bush is just another neo-communist, like Hillary and Clinton, they all have the same one world, Gloabalist world view just maybe different rivers to the same ocean.
I think the therory is a valid one, up to a point. I doubt it was the only reason humans banded together. Before he went off into tin hat land, traax also made another good point, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out banding together would be benificial when it came to protection from predators and the aquiring of food. As the group grew larger then more stable food supplies became important, hunting and gathering can only sustain a small population even in the best of times. Man is attracted to water, so building it’s shelters along waters edge isn’t all that surprising. It gave them what they needed to grow crops, plus a food scource and that all important drink of cool water.
In early society the *elite* were usually the best hunters, the guy with the most vivid imagination always became the tribes religious leader.
The guy with the biggest club ruled well into the middle ages and beyond, brains helped, but really weren’t a nessisity.
The history of human developement isn’t all that comlicated and really hasn’t changed much since pre-historic times, just the terminology.
You mean with global warming, there’s a chance for civilization to become established on the earth?
Jason >>It must have been global warming caused by deforestation – due to campfire and home heating by burning wood!
Not the burning, but the gathering of wood has been a HUGE factor in deforestation. The other is grazing herds like goats.
When a civilation removes a watersheds and ground covers it significantly changes the climate. This can profoundly change lives.
The sad part is that so many people — even smart people here on this blog — refuse to learn from history.
Wow, thanks for the interest people! Just been alerted to this thread. If you go to my home page (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~e118/welcome.htm) and click on “publications” on the right hand side you can download the paper (from “Quaternarary International”) that the talk was based on. Note the second paragraph of the intro should have been a footnote, so the continuity is a bit off. Probably my sloppy checking of the proofs. It might be a bit too academic to be digestible. You can always read the intro, discussion and conclusions, and skip all the detail in between. This will give you the gist of it.
From my research into this area it seems that it’s not just a question of what type of climate is “better” – the point is that we adapt to conditions as they are and when they change we tend to suffer, even if this does drive innovation. It’s the survivors who adapt. Things were easier during the last warm humid period before the big urban civilisations got going, but we’re looking at a warming relative to the cooler “pre-industrial” period (before we started altering large-scale greenhouse gas emissions) of less than 1 degree C, and that perhaps just over the northern hemisphere. By the end of this century we’re looking at probably 2 or 3 degrees – hotter than any time since humans have been around. So this is all unknown territory. I suspect the consequences will be pretty bad, but having been cast as “anti-civilisation” by some who have read the press coverage of the talk, perhaps I shouldn’t be bothered it global warming undermines it…
Regards
Nick B