6 ms·
Collapse of Liangzhu and other Neolithic cultures in response to climate change
- carabiner 5y agoReminds me of the Finno-Korean hyperwar. We could be exploring the stars...
- christkv 5y agoI always recommend this channel if you are interested in the fall of civilizations https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew
- lazypenguin 5y agoGreat podcast, I also recommend it regularly to others. The one thing that gives me comfort is that in modern times we have an unprecedented ability to manipulate our environment unlike those previous civilizations. Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths. I believe our civilization will have extreme challenges in the future but our current technological abilities are really quite staggering.
- christkv 5y agoI think the Greenland one was fascinating as it’s not something I would read about myself. Like a relative quick raise and fall due to climatic change.
- worik 5y agoInteresting. That is exactly what scares me most. > Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths. Leading to greater collapses with worse consequences
- jjoonathan 5y agoYou know what scares me? The rise of learned helplessness and its pseudo-enlightened relative, "we should do nothing because anything we do could go wrong."
- titzer 5y agoCompared to the ultra-stupid "let's pump up global CO2 to levels not seen in 4 million years; we swear nothing bad will happen," doing nothing might be a good change of pace for global civilization.
- lazide 5y agoConsidering said CO2 is already out there and doesn’t seem to be magically disappearing on it’s own, that seems unlikely. And not like those 8 billion mouths that currently need feeding are going to go quietly into that dark night if something starts to go wrong.
- vkou 5y agoI too felt this way, until two weeks ago, when a little unexpected rain wrecked supply lines and transportation networks across British Columbia. The time it took to get them barely-functioning, and the time that it's going to take to get them fully restored is concerning. I believe that we may be able to adapt to long-term, slow-moving catastrophes, that we can all see coming, and have all agreed are important to deal with. Unfortunately, the interests of the people who will be doing the work/paying for people to do the work rarely align in that direction - or stay aligned for the years and decades that it takes to get these solutions built out.
- ksdale 5y agoI mean, it was a ton of unexpected rain, and as far as I know, the only danger was caused by the flooding itself rather than any sort of supply shortages. I suspect that rather than serve as a warning of our inability to solve problems, it will turn out to have been such a non-problem (relative to the amount of damage that happened) that it will be completely forgotten in 10 years.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>I mean, it was a ton of unexpected rain, I thought that was the point of climate change, that there will lots of 'tons of unexpected' climate events happening?
- ksdale 5y agoI was responding to the assertion that it was a "little" rain, rather than that it was unexpected.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agosorry, my mistake.
- vkou 5y ago> the only danger was caused by the flooding itself rather than any sort of supply shortages. There was no danger to Vancouver. It's a port city, that could always be supplied by I-5. There was a lot of danger to Chilliwack, if Highway 1 could not be saved (Which, thankfully, did not turn out to be the case). My parents live in Chilliwack. It was a really scary week for them, between their need for prescription medication and animal feed.
- perfunctory 5y ago> Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places And then you find out that another country wants to pipe water from that exact same place.
- headsoup 5y agoAnd that these 'other places' are not just infinite fountains of reliable water, if they exist at all... It seems modern expectations suggest that the solution always exists, we just need to be clever enough to find it (or 'technology' will just solve it somehow)
- Nasrudith 5y agoCompared to assuming they are intractible a-priori without any proof of course it is of actual use and was selected for survival over "whelp I guess we're all dead because the deer ran away and we are foraged out"! Infinite water is never the goal anyway - it was water for the density of demand from areas which could not use it all anyway like the snow melts in the mountains - where all of it not soaked up literally rolls away. Seriously what is with this trend of Malthusian lazy nihilism? Your body may inevitably start to stink again but that is no excuse to never wash it.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> in modern times we have an unprecedented ability to manipulate our environment unlike those previous civilizations. Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths. Two of those approaches are about as old as agriculture. In the modern day you have people saying that (1) variable rainfall in California is an emergency, but also (2) we shouldn't build aqueducts because that would be expensive.
- egberts1 5y agoAquaducts? What are you driveling on about? Romans made them look cheap, reliable, and ornate enough to last for hundreds of decades.
- thisiswater 5y agoIt's not our ability to survive as a species that concerns me, it's the imminent period of contraction as previously abundant resources become expensive, technology-dependent, and competed over.
- rvense 5y agoHere in Denmark, almost none of the food that the actual people here will eat next week is in the country yet. It's on its way in from overseas or further south. Now, about 60% of the surface area is cultivated. Most of that (80%, so half of the country all in all) is used to grow pig feed. A lot (most, I think) of that meat is exported, in exchange for money - which was always very bad sustenance for pigs and people alike, and, these days, is digital, so in the sense that it "exists" at all, does so in the imagination of sand that was tricked into thinking. There are many adjectives one could use to describe this situation. "Resilient" isn't one of them.
- sharikous 5y agoComing from Israel, where everything is looked at through a military/security/strategic lens, this seems a strategic nightmare, but also wonderful. Danish people know that neighboring nations won't wage war in the near future and can afford to be several steps removed from survival considerations. I don't think, however, that Denmark is irresilient. The same supply chain you are worried to be too dependent from has to be quite robust for the country to rely on that. Apart from sudden and rapid events I bet that same supply chain will handle well medium/slow changes like climate change.
- titzer 5y ago> has to be quite robust Absent frequent disruptions, markets do not optimize for robustness; they optimize for efficiency and profit. So no, I don't agree that these supply chains are robust. It's like arguing "life on Earth evolved to be dependent on oxygen, therefore oxygen must be everywhere in the universe" (not remotely true); classic overfitting.
- landemva 5y agoOur ability to develop and utilize energy is amazing. We now use energy consuming machines, instead of human labor, to produce abundant food.
- Amezarak 5y agoConversely, in modern times we are capable of building increasingly complex and fragile systems to manipulate our environment that are subject to even more disastrous collapses when they eventually fail. Further, increased hyper-specialization means fewer and fewer of the population is capable of engaging in productive behavior when the systems fail. (Twitch streamers cannot rapidly be recruited to help with electrical maintenance, whereas the average neolithic flood victim is approximately as useful as any other.) Further, our social technology appears to be barely chugging along, with people more atomized and the social fabric fraying, meaning falling levels of trust and fewer connections, so coordinating responses to...anything is becoming increasingly difficult.
- thisiswater 5y agoA period of extreme flooding is mentioned in Chinese myth, lasting multiple generations and resisting massive flood control efforts (particularly earthworks of magic , self-reproducing mud). Efforts to date the floods of myth tend to land around the 2000BC mark, approximately 4000 years ago. Interesting to see how this might line up with the archaeological record! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China) for the curious.
- dmix 5y ago> Of note is an abrupt excursion toward a wet climate between 4.3 and 4.0 ka B.P. followed by an abrupt dry event between 4.0 and 3.6 ka B.P., a wet period between 3.6 and 3.3 ka B.P., and another dry period between 3.3 and 3.0 ka B.P. (Fig. 3, E and F), which can be also observed in the Yangkou cave δ13C record (Fig. 3D) from the middle reaches of the YRV, indicating unstable climatic conditions between 4.3 and 3.0 ka B.P. in the region That would be very frustrating having your ancestors complain of too much water and you’re living through a ‘mega drought’. Then repeated swings.
- ncmncm 5y agoI am always mystified by the timelines presented in these papers. 4400 years ago, when this collapse happened, Egyptians had already finished building all three Giza pyramids. Mespotamians and Harappans had built cities for a thousand years, and the former had been writing for hundreds. But the paper says, "Of all Neolithic cultures, the Liangzhu culture was, perhaps, the most materially and technologically advanced".