In my post on Ancient Beer, one of my main sources came over to comment, Merryn and Graham Dinely. Presumably, something pops up when someone links to their site. I should probably have figured that out years ago. Graham suggested that I look into the work of Michael Baillie, a tree-ring expert (dendochronologist, so now you know) whose work indicates terrible conditions 2354-2354 BC, likely resulting in widespread famine. His book is reviewed here at New Scientist. He identifies other dire periods and believes that showers of comets are the most likely explanation. There is no record of volcanoes, and those would not have effects lasting nearly a decade in any event. That particular set of dates is important, as it coincides with Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures and the full replacement of Britain's Neolithic farming population with those peoples who are deeply connected with the Yamnaya, the Indo-European nomadic people. Baillie believes that the replacement was not so much the result of invading horsemen with bronze weapons and cattle but of the nine-year famine wiping out the sedentary population across Europe that was crop dependent, while the (relative) newcomers survived better, though likely not entirely well.
It's a highly plausible story, and similar to the new understandings we are developing of disease wiping out a population, or at least weakening it enough that it can be more easily overcome. The most dramatic example is the discovery of the New World and the massive die-offs of the native populations here, but there's no reason why it could not have happened many other times. I would like to see more evidence before I accept the theory, but I am kindly disposed to it at present. Nine years of famine would certainly be a lot for any population to endure. I do immediately wonder about those societies that survived by fishing, though. They would also have a better chance of hanging on, wouldn't they?
I'm puzzled. I'm assuming that by "swarm of comets" he means some kind of collections of relatively small chunks. The usual comets we see, even when they break up (Shoemaker-Levy) are kind of hefty and would tend to leave a mark. Comet tails are pretty thin--I don't think we'd be able to eyeball the tails of really small comets, which means we'd probably not have seen them at all until they went bang. (Modern telescopes make a difference, of course)
ReplyDeleteThat things do sometimes hit, we know:
https://meteoritical.org/meteorites/tektites
"The first written reference to tektites appeared c. A.D. 950, when Liu Sun in China named them Lei-gong-mo, which means 'Inkstone of the Thundergod' (Barnes, 1969; Bagnall, 1991)."
But the review link cites the book as referring to "hail of red-hot stone that befell the Egyptians", when Exodus actually refers to hail with some fire (lightning?). I think the Egyptians could tell the difference between hail which melts and rocks littering the ground. And maybe I missed it but I didn't see mention of a comet in Exodus. (The Kamil crater doesn't seem to be big enough to have splattered the Nile.)
I'm curious what error bars he has on his "worldwide environmental shocks" 1141BC is close to 1177....
It is well worth reading Mike Baillie's books, they changed my view of prehistory. I think he is referring to all kinds of Cosmic debris hitting the earth, from dust clouds to bolides and air bursts. Catastrophe quite literally means "a star coming apart" like the Shoemaker-Levy. Mike finds one Chinese reference to the 2354-2345 event where it describes 7 suns in the sky, and it not going dark for 3 days.
ReplyDeleteArchaeologists have discovered that the Younger Dryas, around 10000BC, climate change was triggered by a bolide storm across Northern Europe and North America. This ended the Clovis culture, and coincides with the Garden of Eden and the Angel with the fiery sword. This when the climate change occured and the seed gatherers could no longer gather enough grain for their purposes and began cultivation. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was caused by an air burst. More recently the 540-544 close encounter triggered the dark ages with a population crash of around half. this is the Scandinavian Fimbulwinter, with no summer for 3 years. There is even a suggestion that a bolide strike in the Irish sea caused a methane clathrate release containing hydrogen sulphide at this time. This killed the population of Wales and triggered migrations from Britain to France.
I admit I didn't think much about the cometary part at all once I saw the famine part. I just rather passed it along unlooked-at.
ReplyDeleteI dislike single causes on principle, as too many things get shoved in in practice. That last time period would be the latest possible date for any suggested Arthur, and the Plague of Justinian is as likely a catastrophe as the effect of any weather event - though of course these things compound, and a starving people are more susceptible to death by disease.
Ascribing the Garden of Eden to any clear time period is fanciful, and the angel with the fiery sword is exactly the sort of bit that can be fir into any theory you like, and is thus useless. Same also with Sodom and Gomorrah. I have seen a dozen speculations over the years and don't see how this rises about Velikovsky.
I'm willing to give him the dendrochronology, because that's his field, and if he says things grew very poorly for those nine years I accept that. With populations that live forever on the edge, nine years of bad crops would of course be devastating. But the cause of the crop failures is not at all straightforward. It's just a "well, it could be comes."
Checking Wiki on the Younger Dryas, the bolide collision theory is one that is gaining steam but is not secure. The dates aren't quite right for Clovis, though they are close.
ReplyDeleteI keep hoping someone will come up with something thrilling about whatever happened around 1177 B.C. They sure got monkey-hammered one way or another.
ReplyDeleteI am currently most convinced by the idea that the Sea Peoples were being pushed out by expanding groups of Indo-Europeans coming into Europe. Mostly I like it because I want Indo=Europeans to be the explanation for everything.
ReplyDeleteThe Sea Peoples come up a lot. It's just that the collapse seems awfully abrupt. No doubt problems of various sorts were stirring, but I'll always be curious whether there was a major catalyst, something that shut things down so rapidly that people who'd been regularly trading and corresponding in writing didn't even have a chance to record it. It may have been no more complicated than a hard crash from the disintegration of one of the first really widespread international (but naive and fragile) webs of commerce and communication, something no one yet had had a chance to learn how to protect against.
ReplyDeleteI am curious about the date 1177B.C., where does that come from? There are a number of researchers saying that the Egyptian King Lists at that time are out by 300 years. They say that the lists overlap and are not sequential, but the Egyptologists refuse to consider this.
ReplyDelete