8 ms·

Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?

93 points by diodorus 11y ago

cfcef 11y ago
It's always 'climate change'. Dozens of megafauna disappear? 'climate change'. Whole tribes with fortifications suddenly disappear? 'climate change'. Wholesale population replacement? 'climate change'. It's our age's "peoples don't migrate, pots do". It's gotten to the point that when I read about the latest population genetics result show introgression or replacement and they invoke 'climate change', I no longer know if it's a case where it could be climate change or just the usual total refusal to speculate about pre-historic warfare and predation.
- galago 11y ago
  These things aren't mutually exclusive. I think there are events that occurred around periods of climate change, which may have caused changes in animal or human migration. This could lead to warfare, or even more simply disease transmission.
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    We see climate change affecting the Middle East as it dries up sources of water and forces people to migrate or move to the populated cities that have a water source. It has also caused a refugee crisis as people can't get food or water and flee their nation to go some place else to live. It has also allowed terrorists to rise up in Syria and Iraq and take over weakened cities that had water sources dry up and people left unable to defend those cities from takeover by terrorists. So I imagine back during the Ice Age, people moved around as well as struggled to survive. Some lost their food and water sources and turned to warfare on other tribes to survive. People who hung out in southern Europe where the climate was not too bad had a better chance of survival than people who lived on ice sheets up north.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Do you realize that this is basically just apologetics for the reign of W? The reason that there are armed conflicts in Iraq is because USA broke that nation, and the decades it will take to heal have not yet elapsed. The reason there are armed conflicts in Syria is because it's next to Iraq, and also various parties have schemed to weaken the (admittedly awful) incumbent regime. The desert isn't new. It's not as though fifty years ago these places were covered in rain forests. It's not as though ISIS have less need for water than whomever they've replaced.
      - danudey 11y ago
        Not rain forests, but you don't need to be a rain forest to have a water supply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_crisis_in_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_crisis_in_Iran
        PhantomGremlin 11y ago
        I think this chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iran_Population_%281880-2005%29.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iran_Population_%281880-2... might have a tad to do with it. More people means more demand for water.
        philipov 11y ago
        And "climate change" is a misleading word to call resource exhaustion caused by human populations outgrowing the carrying capacity of their environment. It's as if the humans are simply passive victims of external circumstances.
      - w84t1me 11y ago
        Because the middle east was a sea of peace, social stability and contentment beforehand? The Iraq war was a disaster, but let's not kid ourselves about a simplistic root cause.
        11y ago
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    We've had nearly continuous warfare for the last 2,000 years. I've read a number of history books on it, and none have suggested climate change as being a cause, or even a factor.
    - nindalf 11y ago
      You wouldn't ever see "the climate changed so we moved" as a cause here, because climate change takes a few generations to fully manifest. People without written records and good observation tools wouldn't be able to spot or record the climate change. But such people would certainly notice when agricultural output drops and decide to move to places where the situation is better. Such wholesale migrations have been the cause of many conflicts. Steppe nomads have migrated to Europe on many occasions over the last two thousand years and each time it has led to war. Even within Europe this sort of migration was observed. For example, Julius Caesar fought Germanic tribes who had decided to migrate to Gaul because the grass was greener on that side of the Rhine.
      - WalterBright 11y ago
        Populations regularly outgrow their food supply and migrate. That isn't climate change. They also exhaust their land with poor farming practices, that isn't climate change, either.
        restalis 11y ago
        "They also exhaust their land with poor farming practices, that isn't climate change, either." The climate change adepts will argue with you on this one, as human induced (micro)climate change is still considered a climate change.
    - nkurz 11y ago
      This article (written in backlash to some recent high profile claims of conflicts caused by climate change) suggests that blaming climate for human conflicts is nothing new: It’s that they promote a kind of climate reductionism, one that carries echoes of the deterministic theories that were once popular during the second half of the 19th century. Consider, for instance, John William Draper’s History of the American Civil War, published in 1867. Draper, who served as president of the medical college of New York University from 1850 to 1873, was a professor of chemistry and an architect of the so-called “conflict model” of science and religion, bringing a scientist’s eye to his task. On the very first page of his book, he announced “the great truth that societies advance in a preordained and inevitable course” guided by “uncontrollable causes.” Chief among these was the climate. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/04/stop-saying-climate-change-causes-war-paris-cop-21-bernie-sanders/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/04/stop-saying-climate-chan...
- justinator 11y ago
  I mean, reason why humans left Africa, walked upright and grew big brains? Climate change. Think about how many times you control your local micro climate around you. Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever. It's a big force in the human condition.
  - restalis 11y ago
    "Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever." About as many as the moments in which we have to talk with somebody but lack something better to break the ice! __________ P.S.: I've read so far about a number of possible cases for which humans started to walk upright and none had climate change as a primary cause.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    The day to day thermodynamics.
- antocv 11y ago
  I agree, it is kind of obvious, wherever human appear, megafauna disappear, from Europe to South America. Oh must be climate change. It could be climate change, but that doesnt explain anything, since its so far reaching and general. Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.
  - oblio 11y ago
    It's hard to believe that with such a low population, no industry and no agriculture humans could have made a real impact on climate change.
    - jinushaun 11y ago
      You're confusing anthropogenic climate change (pollution) with natural climate change (end of ice age).
      - oblio 11y ago
        I was replying to: > Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.
    - antocv 11y ago
      Pre agriculture society has built Goḱbi Tepe, and other "stone age monuments", its not far fetched that they diverted rivers and thus caused desertification of some area which may had other effects on global climate. Wasnt the Sahara a swamp pre-agriculture? Also, the "pre-agriculture = low population" is just a speculation, it could have been far higher population in some areas and we wouldnt have any evidence for it today. See for example Americas before conquestadors, there were areas with millions of people, and not all doing agriculture or even horticulture. The best areas which could have supported a very high population have been destroyed, all the best areas were taken by "civilized" war people, and now the only nomads/hunter gatherers left are in far-reached shitty areas.
- mcv 11y ago
  Is the end of an ice age not a form of climate change then? A fact of the matter is that a lot of evolution is driven by constantly changing climates. The supervolcanos and asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs also did so through climate change: too much dust in the air and too little sunlight made the land colder, killed much of the plants, and made resources more scarce. Small warm-blooded animals suddenly had the edge. It is a bit of a catch-all, though. Just "climate change" doesn't tell you much. Receding glaciers and more accessible land tells you a lot more.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    And its not like the last ice age just neatly stopped - there was a significant cooling period during the Younger Dryas which wasn't quite a bad as a full Ice Age but was still pretty severe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  It's always 'climate change'. No -- if you read their arguments more closely, what they suspect is that some populations were able to adapt to sudden climate change, while others were not. So really, it's about adaptability.
MichalSikora 11y ago
In my opinion not always "climate change" but one of the main factor. For me main factor is opportunity to moder human to acclimate for this factores. Yes, climate changes are important but more value is respond for that e.g. better groups organisation, better equipment. In that time if you do not acclimate quick you died
jhildings 11y ago
Maybe because they didn't learn to write proper headlines explaining the content of an article ?
Kaius 11y ago
Its peculiar that a group with a specific DNA marker would be wiped out so completely by climate change while another group was not (or at least prospered at a later time in the same region). Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted and the separation of the 2 groups (N and M) in different locations protected enough of the N group for it to prosper. Also isolated pockets of M carriers who had migrated beyond the infected area survived.
- restalis 11y ago
  "Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted" This sounds so familiar! "The previous local populations just vanished and we, the current inhabitants, had nothing to do with it, cross my heart!" The dramatic change should have been very beneficial to the hunter-gatherers. They survived so long in tundra but they somehow couldn't cope with the abundance of plants and plant eating venison brought along? Come on! It's more likely that the previous harsh conditions weren't that inviting for the better hunters of N type super-haplogroup living somewhere else, and as soon as that changed so did the hunting lands' owners!
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Disease is nothing to sneeze at! One new virus could quite possibly have wiped out an entire population (as it did so often in more recent human history). The end of the glaciers was the perfect condition to increase mobility and thus disease vectors. In fact, this is so inevitable we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios?
    - restalis 11y ago
      "we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios" The colonization of Americas is the perfect counter-example for disease wipe-out explanation. Pre-Columbian American population had no immunity whatsoever to a bunch of serious diseases (some of which managed to become pandemics back in colonizer's homelands), diseases that have accumulated over millennia (since the last Bering overland/over-ice human crossing)! You'd expect that on first Columbian contacts there should have appeared a pandemic so severe over the whole Americas that after a few years the Europeans should have had no one alive to encounter! Not only they still encountered, but long after the first contact they also had a hard time dealing with local resistance of underdeveloped tribes which had worse medical conditions than what was to be had in ancient Rome! Not only that locals haven't been wiped out, but they managed to contribute in a large quote to nowadays's Ibero-America's genotype despite the European settlers' massive migration! So yes, I think it's enough reason to consider the disease a less likely cause for a continental scale wipe-out (which is what the article was talking about).
cellularmitosis 11y ago
Those who find this interesting might also find the theories of Randall Carlson interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8

93 points by diodorus 11y ago

cfcef 11y ago

It's always 'climate change'. Dozens of megafauna disappear? 'climate change'. Whole tribes with fortifications suddenly disappear? 'climate change'. Wholesale population replacement? 'climate change'. It's our age's "peoples don't migrate, pots do". It's gotten to the point that when I read about the latest population genetics result show introgression or replacement and they invoke 'climate change', I no longer know if it's a case where it could be climate change or just the usual total refusal to speculate about pre-historic warfare and predation.

galago 11y ago
These things aren't mutually exclusive. I think there are events that occurred around periods of climate change, which may have caused changes in animal or human migration. This could lead to warfare, or even more simply disease transmission.
- orionblastar 11y ago
  We see climate change affecting the Middle East as it dries up sources of water and forces people to migrate or move to the populated cities that have a water source. It has also caused a refugee crisis as people can't get food or water and flee their nation to go some place else to live. It has also allowed terrorists to rise up in Syria and Iraq and take over weakened cities that had water sources dry up and people left unable to defend those cities from takeover by terrorists. So I imagine back during the Ice Age, people moved around as well as struggled to survive. Some lost their food and water sources and turned to warfare on other tribes to survive. People who hung out in southern Europe where the climate was not too bad had a better chance of survival than people who lived on ice sheets up north.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Do you realize that this is basically just apologetics for the reign of W? The reason that there are armed conflicts in Iraq is because USA broke that nation, and the decades it will take to heal have not yet elapsed. The reason there are armed conflicts in Syria is because it's next to Iraq, and also various parties have schemed to weaken the (admittedly awful) incumbent regime. The desert isn't new. It's not as though fifty years ago these places were covered in rain forests. It's not as though ISIS have less need for water than whomever they've replaced.
    - danudey 11y ago
      Not rain forests, but you don't need to be a rain forest to have a water supply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_crisis_in_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_crisis_in_Iran
      - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
        I think this chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iran_Population_%281880-2005%29.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iran_Population_%281880-2... might have a tad to do with it. More people means more demand for water.
        philipov 11y ago
        And "climate change" is a misleading word to call resource exhaustion caused by human populations outgrowing the carrying capacity of their environment. It's as if the humans are simply passive victims of external circumstances.
    - w84t1me 11y ago
      Because the middle east was a sea of peace, social stability and contentment beforehand? The Iraq war was a disaster, but let's not kid ourselves about a simplistic root cause.
      - 11y ago
- WalterBright 11y ago
  We've had nearly continuous warfare for the last 2,000 years. I've read a number of history books on it, and none have suggested climate change as being a cause, or even a factor.
  - nindalf 11y ago
    You wouldn't ever see "the climate changed so we moved" as a cause here, because climate change takes a few generations to fully manifest. People without written records and good observation tools wouldn't be able to spot or record the climate change. But such people would certainly notice when agricultural output drops and decide to move to places where the situation is better. Such wholesale migrations have been the cause of many conflicts. Steppe nomads have migrated to Europe on many occasions over the last two thousand years and each time it has led to war. Even within Europe this sort of migration was observed. For example, Julius Caesar fought Germanic tribes who had decided to migrate to Gaul because the grass was greener on that side of the Rhine.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      Populations regularly outgrow their food supply and migrate. That isn't climate change. They also exhaust their land with poor farming practices, that isn't climate change, either.
      - restalis 11y ago
        "They also exhaust their land with poor farming practices, that isn't climate change, either." The climate change adepts will argue with you on this one, as human induced (micro)climate change is still considered a climate change.
  - nkurz 11y ago
    This article (written in backlash to some recent high profile claims of conflicts caused by climate change) suggests that blaming climate for human conflicts is nothing new: It’s that they promote a kind of climate reductionism, one that carries echoes of the deterministic theories that were once popular during the second half of the 19th century. Consider, for instance, John William Draper’s History of the American Civil War, published in 1867. Draper, who served as president of the medical college of New York University from 1850 to 1873, was a professor of chemistry and an architect of the so-called “conflict model” of science and religion, bringing a scientist’s eye to his task. On the very first page of his book, he announced “the great truth that societies advance in a preordained and inevitable course” guided by “uncontrollable causes.” Chief among these was the climate. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/04/stop-saying-climate-change-causes-war-paris-cop-21-bernie-sanders/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/04/stop-saying-climate-chan...
justinator 11y ago
I mean, reason why humans left Africa, walked upright and grew big brains? Climate change. Think about how many times you control your local micro climate around you. Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever. It's a big force in the human condition.
- restalis 11y ago
  "Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever." About as many as the moments in which we have to talk with somebody but lack something better to break the ice! __________ P.S.: I've read so far about a number of possible cases for which humans started to walk upright and none had climate change as a primary cause.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  The day to day thermodynamics.
antocv 11y ago
I agree, it is kind of obvious, wherever human appear, megafauna disappear, from Europe to South America. Oh must be climate change. It could be climate change, but that doesnt explain anything, since its so far reaching and general. Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.
- oblio 11y ago
  It's hard to believe that with such a low population, no industry and no agriculture humans could have made a real impact on climate change.
  - jinushaun 11y ago
    You're confusing anthropogenic climate change (pollution) with natural climate change (end of ice age).
    - oblio 11y ago
      I was replying to: > Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.
  - antocv 11y ago
    Pre agriculture society has built Goḱbi Tepe, and other "stone age monuments", its not far fetched that they diverted rivers and thus caused desertification of some area which may had other effects on global climate. Wasnt the Sahara a swamp pre-agriculture? Also, the "pre-agriculture = low population" is just a speculation, it could have been far higher population in some areas and we wouldnt have any evidence for it today. See for example Americas before conquestadors, there were areas with millions of people, and not all doing agriculture or even horticulture. The best areas which could have supported a very high population have been destroyed, all the best areas were taken by "civilized" war people, and now the only nomads/hunter gatherers left are in far-reached shitty areas.
mcv 11y ago
Is the end of an ice age not a form of climate change then? A fact of the matter is that a lot of evolution is driven by constantly changing climates. The supervolcanos and asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs also did so through climate change: too much dust in the air and too little sunlight made the land colder, killed much of the plants, and made resources more scarce. Small warm-blooded animals suddenly had the edge. It is a bit of a catch-all, though. Just "climate change" doesn't tell you much. Receding glaciers and more accessible land tells you a lot more.
- arethuza 11y ago
  And its not like the last ice age just neatly stopped - there was a significant cooling period during the Younger Dryas which wasn't quite a bad as a full Ice Age but was still pretty severe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
kafkaesq 11y ago
It's always 'climate change'. No -- if you read their arguments more closely, what they suspect is that some populations were able to adapt to sudden climate change, while others were not. So really, it's about adaptability.

MichalSikora 11y ago

In my opinion not always "climate change" but one of the main factor. For me main factor is opportunity to moder human to acclimate for this factores. Yes, climate changes are important but more value is respond for that e.g. better groups organisation, better equipment. In that time if you do not acclimate quick you died

jhildings 11y ago

Maybe because they didn't learn to write proper headlines explaining the content of an article ?

Kaius 11y ago

Its peculiar that a group with a specific DNA marker would be wiped out so completely by climate change while another group was not (or at least prospered at a later time in the same region). Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted and the separation of the 2 groups (N and M) in different locations protected enough of the N group for it to prosper. Also isolated pockets of M carriers who had migrated beyond the infected area survived.

restalis 11y ago
"Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted" This sounds so familiar! "The previous local populations just vanished and we, the current inhabitants, had nothing to do with it, cross my heart!" The dramatic change should have been very beneficial to the hunter-gatherers. They survived so long in tundra but they somehow couldn't cope with the abundance of plants and plant eating venison brought along? Come on! It's more likely that the previous harsh conditions weren't that inviting for the better hunters of N type super-haplogroup living somewhere else, and as soon as that changed so did the hunting lands' owners!
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Disease is nothing to sneeze at! One new virus could quite possibly have wiped out an entire population (as it did so often in more recent human history). The end of the glaciers was the perfect condition to increase mobility and thus disease vectors. In fact, this is so inevitable we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios?
  - restalis 11y ago
    "we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios" The colonization of Americas is the perfect counter-example for disease wipe-out explanation. Pre-Columbian American population had no immunity whatsoever to a bunch of serious diseases (some of which managed to become pandemics back in colonizer's homelands), diseases that have accumulated over millennia (since the last Bering overland/over-ice human crossing)! You'd expect that on first Columbian contacts there should have appeared a pandemic so severe over the whole Americas that after a few years the Europeans should have had no one alive to encounter! Not only they still encountered, but long after the first contact they also had a hard time dealing with local resistance of underdeveloped tribes which had worse medical conditions than what was to be had in ancient Rome! Not only that locals haven't been wiped out, but they managed to contribute in a large quote to nowadays's Ibero-America's genotype despite the European settlers' massive migration! So yes, I think it's enough reason to consider the disease a less likely cause for a continental scale wipe-out (which is what the article was talking about).

cellularmitosis 11y ago

Those who find this interesting might also find the theories of Randall Carlson interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8