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Collapse of civilisations linked to monsoon changes
Catherine Brahic, New Scientist
The downfall of the one of the greatest Chinese dynasties may have been catalysed by severe changes in climate. The same climate changes may have simultaneously led to the end of the Maya civilisation depicted in Mel Gibson’s new film Apocalypto.
So says Gerald Haug of the GeoForschungsZentrum in Germany and colleagues, who studied geological records of monsoons over the past 16,000 years. They have found a startling correlation between climate extremes and the fall of two great civilisations: the Tang dynasty in China and the Maya of South America. “It blew me away,” says Haug.
The records show that around the time that these civilizations went into decline, they experienced stronger than average winds in the winter and weaker summer monsoon rains. These weak rains would have reduced crop yields.
(4 Jan 2007)
Climate change killed off dynasties in China, Mexico
Michael Sheridan, The Australian
NEW research suggests climate change led to the collapse of the most splendid imperial dynasty in China’s history and to the extinction of the Mayan civilisation in Central America more than 1000 years ago.
There has never been a satisfactory explanation for the fall of the Tang emperors, whose era is viewed as a high point of Chinese civilisation, while the disappearance of the Maya world perplexes scholars.
Now a team of scientists has found evidence a shift in monsoons led to drought and famine in the final century of Tang power. The weather pattern may also have spelt doom for the Maya in faraway Mexico at about the same time, they say.
Both ruling hierarchies at the start of the 10th century were victims of poor rainfall and starvation among their peoples when the harvests failed.
…The cause was to be found in the migration of a band of heavy tropical rain, which moves in response to phenomena such as El Nino, scientists have argued in an article in Nature.
The effect was to end two golden ages that existed in ignorance of one another on opposite sides of the world.
The scientific team, led by Gerald Haug of Germany’s national geosciences research centre, found a massive movement in tropical rainfall took place in early 900 in both regions.
(8 Jan 2007)
Contributor SP writes: So the medieval warm period wasn’t all good news then…
Apocalypto: A Movie Review
Byron W. King, Whiskey & Gunpowder
…The essence and drama of the movie is that by the time frame of the Western 16th century, Mayan civilization had, to cite Durant, all but destroyed itself from within. History records that in 1517, the first Spanish explorers landed on the Yucatan Peninsula. And from that point forward, it took only a few thousand Spanish conquistadors, and the passage of not very much time, to finish the job of figuratively, if not literally, killing off the Mayan culture, if not most of the Mayans.
…But I entitled this article a “movie review,” so first things first. Wow, this is one gory movie. Blood. And guts. Lots of blood. Lots of guts.
…Between the visual scenes, the sounds, the script, and the worthy cast, all trace of the 21st century is absent from Apocalypto. The viewer is transported back in time to another place, another culture, and immersed in a different world. But how different is this other world, really? Despite the apparent primitiveness and differences of the Mayan world, certainly as compared with ours, Jaguar Paw and Zero Wolf are representatives of a complex society, each playing their respective roles assigned to them by fate.
Mayan civilization was extensive, both in terms of a large population and geographic extent. Mayan civilization ranged from southern Mexico to the Yucatan, and down into areas that are now parts of Guatemala and El Salvador. And as the movie makes clear, Mayan society had numerous specialized social roles incorporated within it. Boiled down to an anthropological essence, Mayan society was heterogeneous and filled with social inequality, so by definition, it was “complex.”
…So the movie Apocalypto is more than just an action-packed, head-bashing, blood-and-guts chase film. Sure, Zero Wolf and his gang of merry men raid the village where Jaguar Paw dwells. There is a bunch of killing and hacking, and Jaguar Paw and friends get dragged off to the big city, to be used as sacrifice bait. On the trek to the Mayan equivalent of Gotham City (or is it Las Vegas, what with all the tall temples where people pray for good fortune?), Jaguar Paw sees the horrible environmental devastation that concentrated amounts of Mayan civilization has created and, contemplatively, wonders at it all.
…If you do not want to see the movie, you should at least read the book. And that book would be the pathbreaking 1988 work The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph Tainter. No, I do not believe that The Collapse of Complex Societies actually formed the basis for Mel Gibson’s screenplay, as the previously noted The Jesuits in North America in the 17th Century formed the basis for Black Robe. But in Tainter’s remarkable study of the history of collapsed civilizations, including the Mayan, he listed four concepts that help to explain how and why societies collapse:
1. Human societies are problem-solving organizations.
2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance.
3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita.
4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
Tainter explains that the “number of challenges with which the universe can confront a society is, for practical purposes, infinite.” But complex societies seem to have a sociopolitical inertia that keeps on increasing their level of complexity in order to survive new challenges. In the early stages, societies in the ascendancy can afford to throw resources at their problems. But this cannot go on indefinitely. Or at least, no other society in history has even managed to pull it off over the long haul.
According to Tainter’s thesis, there comes a time when what he characterizes as “investments in additional complexity” produce fewer and fewer returns over time, until, eventually, the whole construct reaches a point of precarious stability due to diminishing return. That is, society cannot muster enough energy continuously to fuel its inherent complexity. Past that point, it is only a matter of time before the inevitable collapse occurs. When a new challenge comes along, whether it is exhaustion of a critical resource, climate stress, outside invasion, or some other set of circumstances, the overly complex society will be unable to muster the resources necessary to deal with the crisis. And at this point, society collapses.
If an overly complex society is fortunate, it will merely deconstruct itself and revert to a much simpler form. And if it is not fortunate, the representatives of an unsustainably complex society will encounter a few ships belonging to foreign explorers, anchored offshore and sending small boats toward the beach, just like in the movies. The rest, as they say, is history.
(4 Jan 2007)
