![]() Many researchers argue that evidence indicates the event was not a global one. The choice to use it to mark the start of the Meghalayan has faced constant criticism. However, the 4.2 ka bp event has been dogged by controversy. Such geological boundaries can only be defined on the basis of global transitions - so the implication was that the 4.2 ka bp event affected the entire planet. Most significantly, in 2018 it became enshrined in the geological timescale as the start of the current age, the Meghalayan, named after a region in India in which a stalagmite holds a record of the climatic shift. It has become increasingly prominent in studies of Earth’s recent past. The drying is now known by many in the field as the 4.2 ka bp event also written as 4.2 kyr bp ( bp meaning before 1950). In all these places, he says, there is evidence from around 4,200 years (kyr) ago for a drying climate, for the collapse of central authorities, and for people moving to escape the newly arid zones (see ‘Hard times’). “We’ve got Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Aegean and the Mediterranean all the way to Spain,” says Weiss. What’s more, the Akkadian Empire was not the only complex society that was disrupted or overthrown as a result. He has become convinced that the drought of 2200 bc was not confined to Mesopotamia, but rather that it had effects around the globe. This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.įor Weiss, it was the start of a research endeavour spanning decades. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down 1. The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region. The drought hit in roughly 2200 bc, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago - something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era.
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