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You're absolutely right. Manbearpig should add this to his little slide show. |
Posted on 09/07/2006 5:24:26 AM PDT by Pharmboy
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 will challenge existing views of how and why civilisation arose. He will argue 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."
He added that for many, if not most people, the development of civilisation meant a harder life, less freedom, and more inequality. The transition to urban living meant that most people had to work harder in order to survive, and suffered increased exposure to communicable diseases. Health and nutrition are likely to have deteriorated rather than improved for many.
The new research challenges the widely held belief that the development of civilization was simply the result of a transition from harsh, unpredictable climatic conditions during the last ice age, to more benign and stable conditions at the beginning of the Holocene period some 10,000 years ago.
The research also has profound philosophical implications because it challenges deeply held beliefs about human progress, the nature of civilisation and the origins of political and religious systems that have persisted to this day. It suggests that civilisation is not our natural state, but the unintended consequence of adaptation to climatic deterioration - a condition of humanity "in extremis".
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."
Yes ... and thanks for the ping!
*
It was caused by global warming due to all those people walking around stirring up dust.
Back then dust was known as the "primary greenhouse gas" according to Dr. Flintstone.
"Poke a hole in the silt and plant your grain..."
Must resist... too early too be nasty!
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You're absolutely right. Manbearpig should add this to his little slide show. |
Wow! Do you have a quick eye! 
Are you a detective, or editor, or insurance claims adjuster, or something?
Ping
Check out http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1670875/posts#21 and the links to Muller's website. Also check out this video., http://muller.lbl.gov/images/inner.mov, which shows eccentricities in the earth's orbit over the last 3 million years. It's a 12 MB file, so click at your own risk.
--I don't doubt that warming and cooling occur--just suspect that sun variation and earthly things-vulcanism, meteor impacts, etc., -make the most changes---
related:
Exodus From Drying Sahara Gave Rise to Pharaohs, Study Says
National Geographic News | July 20, 2006 | Sean Markey (no funky bunch)
Posted on 07/22/2006 9:34:42 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1670680/posts
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
--while I agree that climate changes, this isn't the cause, IMHO--
It would appear to be a potentially strong initiator. The cause lay in what factors come in to play with a change in orbit that would induce significant change in climates.
Some reference material on the subject:
Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Brief Introduction to the History of Climate
by Richard A. Muller
And
Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle
Richard A. Muller* and Gordon J. MacDonaldSince orbital inclination does not affect insolation, we must search for another mechanism relating it to climate. The only plausible one we have found is accretion of interplanetary material: meteoroids and dust. As the orbit of the earth changes, it passes through different parts of the sun's zodiacal ring, and encounters different regions of material. Changes in inclination will be reflected in changes of accretion. Glacier growth occurs during periods of low inclination, and recession during times of high inclination. We emphasize that this mechanism is speculative, and there is no known meteoroid or dust band that satisfies all the properties that we require, although it is possible that such a band could have been missed. We will offer some indirect evidence that accretion does vary with the orbital inclination.
Interplanetary dust accreting on the sun has previously been proposed as a driver of the ice ages (ref 26, 27). Clube (ref 28) discussed the possibility of accretion from a single large and unknown meteoroid stream affecting the Earth's climate, but he did not draw any connection to the periodicity of glacial cycles. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (ref 29) calculated the effect that accreting dust in the atmosphere could have on the greenhouse effect through the seeding of ice crystals, and they speculated that such accretion could have been responsible for the Little Ice Age. At a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society reported by G. Manley (ref30), Hoyle discussed the possibility that accretion could remove enough stratospheric water to reduce the greenhouse effect and causing cooling. Stratospheric dust can also be an effective scavenger of other greenhouse gases, such as ozone.
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/aip/physnews.252.html#1
INTERPLANETARY DUST PARTICLES (IDPs) are deposited on the Earth at the rate of about 10,000 tons per year. Does this have any effect on climate? Scientists at Caltech have found that ancient samples of helium-3 (coming mostly from IDPs) in oceanic sediments exhibit a 100,000-year periodicity. The researchers assert that their data, taken along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, support a recently enunciated idea that Earth's orbital inclination varies with a 100-kyr period; this notion in turn had been broached as an explanation for a similar periodicity in the succession of ice ages. (K.A. Farley and D.B. Patterson, Nature, 7 December 1995.)
Farley & Patterson 1998, http://www.elsevier.com/gej-ng/10/20/36/33/37/32/abstract.html
Farley http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~farley/
Farley http://www.elsevier.nl/gej-ng/10/18/23/54/21/49/abstract.html
http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/pr96/dec96/noaa96-78.html
ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE DURING LAST GLACIAL PERIOD COULD BE TIED TO DUST-INDUCED REGIONAL WARMING
Preliminary new evidence suggests that periodic increases in atmospheric dust concentrations during the glacial periods of the last 100,000 years may have resulted in significant regional warming, and that this warming may have triggered the abrupt climatic changes observed in paleoclimate records, according to a scientist at the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Current scientific thinking is that the dust concentrations contributed to global cooling.
Hmmmm an interesting little recent tidbit:
Mysterious glowing clouds targeted by NASA
26 May, 2006
High-altitude noctilucent clouds have been mysteriously spreading around the world in recent years (Image: NASA/JSC/ES and IA)
So that we are clear, my point is only that variations in the earth's orbit are also a significant factor.
Regards,
I am sitting here at work in my office and yukking it up. Dr. Flinstone indeed!
( :-D
Touche!
Man is the only animal that can live anywhere, hot or cold, high or low, under water, in outer space, on the moon. Man's settlement of painfully cold areas was mainly to move to a better neighborhood, away from minorities, crime, and war. Canada is a modern example of this.
On a scale of one to ten for climate changes, Genesis 7:4 would likely fall pretty close to a ten.....
That less freedom thing is true today...it explains why the rural areas vote "red," and why urban ones vote "blue." Freedom has to be automatically curtailed by crowded conditions, one's actions are much more likely to infringe on the freedom of others' actions in an urban environment than a rural one. Rural folk are used to making their own decisions, urban ones are far more used to authority, which they rely on.
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