Those pyramids should stand as an eternal monument to the inherent folly of government spending. It may keep people busy, and it may look like things are getting done, but it merely squanders human and physical resources, and is inherently uneconomic. A collossal waste of productive human energy -- and for what? To assuage the ego of some delusional tyrant.
Just think how that society would have thrived if all those poor souls assigned to monument building and similar tasks had been allowed to pursue their own individual talents and goals.
I don't know much about Egyptian history, but obviously it was doomed to failure from the getgo.
11/04/01 Story About Impact Site in Iraq
Scholarly Site for geological and historical neo-catastrophism & debunking Global Warming Hysteria.
I see someone posted the pic from that thread, but the link to the thread is here. Sorry if someone beat me to it and this is a duplicate. Hope it's the one you're looking for blam. I'm interested in this too, and am starting to build some reference links. If you have any interesting links, I'd appreciate a copy of them.
Mike G L Baillie
Palaeoecology Centre, School of Geosciences, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland
e-mail: mbaillie@queens-belfast.ac.uk
In 1988 the observation was made that narrowest-ring events in Irish sub-fossil oak chronologies appeared to line up with large acidities in the Greenland ice records from Camp Century and Dye3. Three of the events, at tree-ring ages 2345 BC, 1628 BC and 1159 BC turned out to be of particular interest as they contributed to debates on the Hekla 4 eruption in Iceland, dated to 2310±20 CalBC, Santorini in the Aegean, dated to circa 1670-1530 CalBC, and, possibly, Hekla 3, linked by Hammer and colleagues to their 1120±30 BC acid layer. It quickly became apparent, most notably through comments from Kevin Pang, that the two later events might relate in some way to the start and end of the Chinese Shang dynasty. It is equally of interest that the Egyptian New Kingdom traditionally spans the approximate range 1570 to 1080 BC. So the question arose whether these two volcano-related events could have caused widespread dynastic change. In order to proceed with this debate it is necessary to attempt to get a better handle on the nature of the effects. This paper will look at information from American and Fennoscandian tree-ring records and make some attempt to define the nature of the 1628 BC and 1159 BC events; are they truly abrupt, as would be expected with volcanoes, or are they imposed on pre-existing downturns. Existing exidence suggests that the latter may be the case. If this is correct, it seems appropriate to ask what might have caused the downturns? This question leads logically to the speculation that loading of the atmosphere from space might be a significant factor in the environmental downturns.
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MIKE BAILLIE is a professor in the Palaeoecology Centre, School of Geosciences, Queen's University, Belfast, N. Ireland. After reading physics at Queen's he moved into Archaeology and Palaeoecology taking a particular interest in chronology. His specialism is dendrochronology, and he has been involved in the construction of some of the first, long, oak chronologies. Using information from tree-ring records, he has attempted to identify abrupt environmental downturns in the past and to demonstrate their effects on past human populations. He publishes widely on these and related topics and is the author of A Slice Through Time: dendrochronology and precision dating (London: Routledge 1995).
It looks like there could have been a solar minimum, a major volcanic eruption and a meteor impact all at about the same time.
Judging by your links, you'll like this site.
That's very interesting. Happened within perhaps a hundred years of the birth of Abraham, in Ur, Iraq.
I've had a lifelong interest in ancient civilizations, doesn't matter if it's "Chariots of the Gods" type pseudoscience or hard archaeology.
We swapped some posts the other day about what to call an archaeology bump list, was there a decision?
These were my suggestions, I don't know if their were others:
- Digging the Past
- Stones, Bones, Tomes and Thrones
- Gods, Graves, Glyphs and Myths
I think Ernest and callisto liked "Gods, Graves, Glyphs and Myths." Would dinosaur finds fit there or elsewhere?
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| By Kenneth Chang ABCNEWS.com If it weren’t for a prolonged cool spell about 12,500 years ago, perhaps we’d still be hanging out as hunter-gatherers and never bothered with civilization. At that time, a major source of food for people living in the Middle East was vast fields of einkorn, wheat, barley and rye. These plants, particularly sensitive to cool temperatures, suffered when the warmth since the last Ice Age was interrupted by a 1,000-year-long cool and dry period called the Younger Dryas. Necessity is the Mother of Farming The beginnings of farming appear to coincide with the Younger Dryas.
According to Ofer Bar-Yosef, an anthropologist at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, that’s no coincidence. Instead of relying on what was growing naturally, he says, people started clearing land and planting seeds to insure they would have enough food. “It caused people to initiate cultivation,” he says. Bar-Yosef’s findings also narrow the location of the first farmers to the western half of the “Fertile Crescent” — an arcing swath of the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf north to Turkey and then back down through Syria, Lebanon and Israel toward Egypt. According to Bar-Yosef, the wild varieties of grains thrived in the western region and were transplanted elsewhere later. As people settled down and developed agriculture, towns and eventually civilization arose. That’s not the only time that climate may have shaped the course of humanity. Bar-Yosef and other researchers presented findings about climate and civilization last Saturday at the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science meeting in Anaheim, Calif. “We are probably more affected more by weather and climate than we think we are,” says Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and another of the speakers at the Anaheim session. Not Always Like Today Until a few years ago, most scientists believed the climate of the past 11,000 years — a period known as the Holocene that followed the Younger Dryas — has been stable and uninteresting, and thus of little influence on the fortunes of civilization. However, climate records reconstructed from ice and sediment cores around the world paint a less benign weather history. While the temperature and rainfall swings haven’t been as wild as some periods in Earth’s history, they do appear enough to topple nations.
In 2280 B.C., a civilization called the Akkadians absorbed Tell Leilan. A century later, the town had emptied out and remained unpopulated for three centuries. The entire Akkadian civilization collapsed and disappeared. “There is a depopulation, desertion of northern Mesopotamian region,” says Harvey Weiss, professor of prehistorical archaeology at Yale University, who led excavations at Tell Leilan, “and Tell Leilan’s abandonment is simply typical of that process.” Long Drought Climate records show rainfall dried up in the Middle East around 2200 B.C., which would have deprived farmers of needed winter rains. In cores dug up in the Gulf of Oman to the south, sediments deposited during this time show very different minerals, indicating different wind patterns. Other archaeological sites show that cities to the south, surrounded by irrigated fields, swelled in population at the same time. When the climate connection to the Akkadian collapse was first presented a few years ago, some wondered whether farmers had inadvertantly caused their own ruin by overfarming. Data from other researchers gleaned from lake sediments around the world indicate the 2200 B.C. climate shift was a global event. “This has now put a lot more details together for it,” Weiss says.
Another major climate swing was the Little Ice Age, which froze Europe in the 1400s and killed off Viking settlements in Greenland. And perhaps also the one occurring today. Temperatures, nudged up by emissions of greenhouse gases, have risen sharply since the beginning of the century, but the wind patterns are largely unchanged, creating an unnatural combination of conditions. “You put those two together,” Mayewski says, “you have potentially greater instability in climate. It could turn out it is more important that humans have changed the stability of climate than just the temperature.” Those potential instabilities — droughts, heat waves, fiercer storms — could change the course of history yet to come. 
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S U M M A R Y A cool shift in climate may have spurred the start of farming and civilization.
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