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posted by martyb on Thursday February 02 2017, @12:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the moved-south-for-the-winter dept.

What caused the rapid disappearance of a vibrant Native American agrarian culture that lived in urban settlements from the Ohio River Valley to the Mississippi River Valley in the two centuries preceding the European settlement of North America? In a new study, researchers from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis reconstructed and analyzed 2,100 years of temperature and precipitation data—and point the finger at climate change.

Employing proxies of prehistoric temperature and precipitation preserved in finely layered lake sediments, somewhat analogous to tree-ring records used to reconstruct drought and temperature, the IUPUI scientists have reported on the dramatic environmental changes that occurred as the Native Americans—known as Mississippians—flourished and then vanished from the Midwestern United States. The researchers theorize that the catastrophic climate change they observed, which doomed food production, was a primary cause of the disappearance.

"Abrupt climate change can impose conditions like drought. If these conditions are severe and sustained, as we have determined that they became for the Mississippians, it is virtually impossible for societies, especially those based on agriculture, to survive," said paleoclimatologist Broxton Bird, corresponding author of the new study. "From the lake records, we saw that the abundant rainfall and consistent good weather—which supported Mississippian society as it grew—changed, making agriculture unsustainable." Bird is an assistant professor of earth sciences in the School of Science at IUPUI.

This failure of their principal food source likely destabilized the sociopolitical system that supported Mississippian society, according to archeologist Jeremy Wilson, a study co-author. He is an associate professor of anthropology in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI.

Other theories have suggested they exceeded their environment's carrying capacity, or that disease wiped out large numbers of people.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @06:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @06:22PM (#462040)

    If a seed can survive years without being planted, it's probably a weed.

    A "weed" is just a plant which humans don't like. For example, dandylions can be either a pretty flower or a weed in the lawn. Witer lilys are a beautiful plant, or a weed which chokes out your pond. Bamboo can be a great food source, or a weed which takes over the garden.

    Weeds are not a technical definition... and in fact if people used native plants rather than trying to force all landscape to look identical everywhere, there would be far fewer "weeds" all around.