SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Humans didn't speed up the drying of the Sahara, and in fact they may have delayed it
[...] The practice of early cattle farming, called “pastoralism,” has been blamed by some for the loss of vegetation and the shift from a green Sahara region to a dry desert. A team of scientists from University College London and King’s College London seek to dispel that notion with new climate models that show that the Sahara was destined to be a bone-dry desert regardless of human interaction.
[...] “The possibility that humans could have had a stabilizing influence on the environment has significant implications,” Dr. Chris Brierley of University College London and lead author of the work, said in a statement. “We contest the common narrative that past human-environment interactions must always be one of over-exploitation and degradation. The fact that societies practising ‘pastoralism’ persisted in this region for so long and invested both economically and ideologically in the local landscape, does not support the scenario of over-exploitation.”
The eventual collapse of the “Green Sahara” was caused by a dramatic decline in moisture over many years. Regular monsoons which blanketed the area in water eventually stopped, with less rain and thereby less vegetation to serve as the foundation for the rest of the ecosystem. Humans in the area would have done whatever they could to keep things going smoothly, but the long draughts would have been simply too much to overcome.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:01PM (10 children)
It shifted climate and destroyed humanity's earliest known major civilization, Atlantis.
Look into the Younger Dryas period, and the growing body of indisputable evidence that mankind had achieved a lot more than nomadic almost-extinction some 13 thousand years ago.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday October 03 2018, @12:34PM (9 children)
Atlantis, let us note, is merely the name of a fictional society ginned up by Plato. It's a really cool story, bro, but claiming that there's a 13k old society that just happens to be based on that story is never going to have a growing body of indisputable evidence.
Further, what growing body of indisputable evidence? The indisputable evidence misses several key pieces such as: 1) Where was Atlantis?, 2) What did they eat? - virtually all domesticated plants and animals are far younger than 13k years old, and 3) Why didn't this supposed advanced society rub off on anyone either technology, culture, or genetics? - all we have is a story.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:28PM
It's well known that at the time Atlanteans left the Milky way for the Peagasus galaxy.
And Atlantis, as of today, is rumoured that it's still on the far side of the Moon after leaving the coast off San Francisco, but must return to Pegasus shortly due to serious technical issues
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:39PM (6 children)
Go read about it.
I can't help if you're mind is made up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:36PM (3 children)
I was watching Ancient Greece in 18 minutes [youtube.com] (maybe we can get a general fact-check on the video from Aristarchus?), and they suggested Crete as the location of Atlantis, the major disaster being the Minoan eruption [wikipedia.org]. (Also liked Ancient Rome in 20 minutes.)
Another compelling landmark is the Richat Structure [wikipedia.org] in western Africa. It's super-easy to find when you're looking in from space [google.com] and seems to be about the right size for Atlantis, including what look like concentric rings. I loaded NOAA's GLOBE data [noaa.gov] (Global Land One-km Base Elevation) into Pov-Ray and gave it a render. The whole thing is a dome, and the concentric rings didn't appear.
What is almost certain is that large flooding events occurred in recent prehistory. Many completely independent cultures have flood myths.
Perhaps we will never know whether Atlantis was an actual place or merely an allegory for past civilizations (multiple) that was destroyed in one of those cataclysms. On the other hand, crowdfunding is open to the cut-throat world of archaeology (Indiana Jones, Daniel Jackson, etc... all the coolest characters are archaeologists!), so maybe we should put together a Kickstarter to dredge the area around Crete and do some excavations around the Richat structure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:17PM
Just enjoy the topic; this isn't meant as proof.
Bright Insight (proponent of Richat)
Ancient Architects (proponent of place between Ireland/Iceland)
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday October 03 2018, @11:05PM
It's never been submerged in water. And it's the top of a salt dome. The concentric circles are layers of overburden rock that were lifted by the rising salt dome and eroded away. There's no sinking present there.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 04 2018, @01:00AM
We should all be aware that the flooding was real. Maybe the myths haven't accurately detailed the flooding, but it was real. At the end of the ice age, the sea level rose by tens of feet. I don't recall how much the seas rose, but up they went. I vaguely recall an article about fishing sites and a village in the south of England, that is now far out into the English Channel.
The various cultures and civilizations around the world would have viewed the flooding as major catastrophes, just as our own time views a sea rise of a couple feet as a major catastrophe. But, in the future, just as in the past, man will retreat from the water front, recover, and go on.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 03 2018, @11:01PM
I have read up on it and several other similar theories. And the lack of evidence, despite your assertions to the contrary, is the deal killer. Once again, just things I noted are huge problems. You don't have a location for Atlantis. You don't have a people for Atlantis. You don't have technology, food, culture, etc for Atlantis. All you have is a story.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:42AM
None of these "resources" are ever mentioned just as they aren't mentioned here. What's the reason? Afraid we're look and publicly discover that these resources are written up by a bunch of frauds and nutcases?
I notice that I made a number of serious objections that were completely ignored. For example [soylentnews.org]:
I am rebutting here a classic, dishonest ploy. The claim that because we can't instantly figure out sophisticated stone-working techniques from the various civilizations of the ancient world, then that means someone other than the people living there must have built the object. It's got to be Atlantis! I recall the same thing said of aliens.
Well two can play that game. It's now been explained to you why a global civilization, Atlantis or not, didn't exist: no genetic exchange of global scale, and no other commonalities of technology, culture, etc. One can't accept that truth and retain the theory, they can only ignore it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:12PM
I think it might have been a civilization large for their time which then in the tales got bigger over time (remember, it's in a time before writing was invented). The tales might have been about about “the biggest settlement all around” which might have been just, say, a hundred people, but as contemporary settlements got bigger, the meaning of “the biggest” changed, too, until it “grew” into a mega-city.
And the catastrophe that caused them to abandon the settlement had to grow correspondingly. To have a hundred-people settlement destroyed in a day, it doesn't take much. But a large city of thousands of people, it has to be a catastrophe of epic dimensions.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.