Doooooooom!
(Science 2.0) Climate change may have been be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2,000 B.C. – but it wasn’t the modern political connotation of climate change, with man-made carbon dioxide causing warming, it was global cooling.
At the end of the Holocene Climatic Optimum, a 4,000 year period of warm weather, it was no longer possible for ancient people on the Tibetan Plateau to cultivate millet, their primary food source, and after productivity declined most left. Not forever, a few hundred years later they were growing wheat and barley. That’s because wheat and barley have higher frost tolerance and a lower heat requirement than millet, making them better suited for the high altitudes and suddenly colder weather of eastern Tibet. In a new paper in PNAS, a team argues that the change in climate led to the change in culture still evident today.Â
Damn that climate change….wait, what? An article actually mentioned that it was cooling that caused this problem? That’s weird. They usually just mention “climate change” without mentioning which type. I actually just deleted a few articles out of Pocket that were doing just that in regards to the end of the Mayans.
Intriguing speculation is that if the climate heats up the way leading computer models say it will, millet may be en vogue again.
So, what they’re saying is that it was much, much warmer previously? Huh.
