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The researchers have discovered some ancient changes in the hydrologic regime of rivers in north-west India. There's a big step from here to actually explaining
by zeteo 14y ago
The researchers have discovered some ancient changes in the hydrologic regime of rivers in north-west India. There's a big step from here to actually explaining civilizational collapse. Particularly, two factors argue against such a narrow explanation. First, the region was still agriculturally quite fertile after these changes in the monsoon pattern; the later Mahajanapadas did quite well in this area. Second, the contemporary Sumerian civilization was not destroyed, despite being affected with even more serious ecological problems (its heartland is now a mixture of marsh and desert). Its center simply shifted north, and it gradually transformed into the Babylonian civilization. With no shortage of fertile areas in the Indian subcontinent, the reasons why the Indus Valley civilization failed to either adapt or shift its center of gravity and instead completely disappeared from history are still, I believe, an open problem.
- einhverfr 14y agoOne of the most interesting books out there on civilization collapse is "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations" by Joseph Tainter. His thesis is that the primary driver of civilization collapse is actually complexity, and that as societies face problems, such as ecological problems, or invasions from outside, usually, they solve these problems by adding social complexity. For example Rome tried to solve the problem of diminishing agricultural returns by binding farmers to their land. As Prof. Tainter puts it, these societies run into trouble when they have to make large investments in order to maintain their current way of life. If this pattern holds out, it may be that the more advanced a civilization is, the more vulnerable it is to collapse due to pressures of this sort. In other words, at some point, the complexity becomes self-defeating and civilization crumbles.