Re: dry Meditteranean

From: Damien R. Sullivan (dasulliv_at_cs.indiana.edu)
Date: 01/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 19:40:56 +0000 (UTC)

"Daryl Krupa" <icycalmca@yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Then the glaciers melt, the seas rise, and half the world's
>> population is forced back into the now over-populated hinterland,
>
>People adapted to coastal living would follow the retreating coast,
>not retreat further into the hinterland.

Well, yes; what I meant was that the new coastal area would be what was
formely hinterland, and that the slowly retreating coastal dwellers would find
other tribes living there, so you could have population pressure on top of the
climate change.

>There was an earlier period of relatively rapid rise, but you
>should think in terms of cms-per-year, not something that would
>be dramatic enough to force a mass migration.
>
>Check out these generalised global sea level rise curves:
>
>http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/GEODEPT/COURSES/geo-10/images/sea_level_rise.gif

Dramatic enough to be noticeable, though. 1 cm/year could be 1 m/year
laterally, given <1 degree slopes, yes? And 60 meters in the lifespan of a
grandparent. I didn't mean that the tribe ever had to pack up and hike; the
theory seemed to be more about the gradual but noticeable shifting and
contracting of the coastal area.

>I tend towards the idea that climate deterioration and increasing
>variability were more significant in putting pressure on hunter-
>gatherers to start practicing agriculture. Wheat, for example,

Sure. Though I've seen the reverse of this: that we've been in an unusually
stable climate for the last 10,000 years and that's why agriculture took off
then and not at some point in the past; it would never have been that
long-term successful before.

(This is unrelated to the coastal flood idea.)

>The lower Nile, for example, was a deep gorge in glacial times,
>and most of the proto-delta was high and dry. The gorge took a while

Huh.

>but the general background of the evolution of the Tigris-Euphrates
>delta and the Persian Gulf inundation can be seen here:
>
>http://athens.arch.ox.ac.uk/ArchAtlas/Environmental%20change/Environmetal%20change.htm

Interesting. Totally dry Persian Gulf area. But I see that rising sea
levels can increase length of coastline, so I'm not sure coastal living area
actually goes down.

>> The flood wouldn't be catastrophic -- "Walk, walk slowly for the hills!"
>> but culturally traumatic.
>
>The trouble is, few, if any, cultures survive from the time of
>noticeable sea level rise.

IIRC, Tudge seemed big on oral history lasting longer than it's usually given
credit for, at least when not disrupted by invasions. So, Australian
aborigines describing features which have been submerged for 8000 years. And
while in Greece, say, coastal cultures wouldn't have survived intact past the
invasions from inland, oral histories could have survived up till then, and
informed some parts of Greek culture, such as the Golden Age idea.

I mean, often I follow David Brin in thinking cultures looking back
nostalgically at the past is just human nature, but then people talk about
early agricultural skeletons looking a lot less healthy than old
hunter-gatherer skeletons, and I think "y'know, there kind of was a Golden
Age, relatively speaking, and why couldn't they *tell* and remember?"

>Catastrophic change is unlikely, but avoids the problem of

Catastrophic change is infrequent. If you wait long enough, it's guaranteed.

But I wasn't talking about catastrophes. And part of Tudge's point was to
strengthen the sense of deep time. For example, once you grasp that modern
human beings are at least 50,000 years old, you realize that "ancient history"
is pretty recent, relatively speaking, and even the beginnings of agriculture
are in the latest 20% of human history. 40,000 years of hunter-gatherer
wanderings, a historical black hole. Yeah, maybe life was dull by the measure
of typical history books, but it can't have been empty. Language change,
religious development, technological development, trade networks, lots of
raids, lots of stories, which we'll never know about. It's a different
perspective than the "Lo, interesting life began in Mesopotamia and Egypt"
which one gets in school.

-xx- Damien X-)

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