Hungry Steppes Horsemen. Credit

Paleoclimatology (20 Oct 2017) is a useful science for archaeologists to determine weather conditions during dated material cultures and material horizons.  The material records and interpretations tell us how weather behaved in the distant past through many often-cross-referenced indicators. Unless you consider yourself the leading expert on this subject (always a mistake in the hard sciences, never assailable in the soft sciences) and are professionally updated on recently available data, you will profit by reading the entire preceding link and clicking (if just for a moment) on each of its embedded links.

For archaeologists, this science is revealing unforeseen explanations for ancient cultural changes. We have pointed this out from the outset of this blog. Put “paleoclimatology” in the search bar and you’ll get 8 direct hits, but it is a rare post that does not deal with some aspect of local, current weather e.g. droughts, abnormally high mortality, inexplicable cultural changes, population collapse etc.

For my upcoming novel, I’m interested in the effect of the 5.9 Kiloyear Event (21 Oct 2017) upon the Ubaid (3 Nov 2017) large-scale agriculturalists and the Botai (14 Aug 2017) horse-dependent rancher-hunters. The preceding 5.9 Kiloyear Event link lists many effects including both the end of the Ubaid Period and the disbursal of Steppes nomads mainly westward into Europe. From this I hypothesize:

• The western-steppes nomads migrated westward into Europe because most of them: (1) were located between the northern Caucasus Mountains, Carpathian Mountains, and eastern frontier of Europe; (2) knew something about Europe and its conditions (like the Vikings knew something about the coasts of the British Isles and western Europe), and (3) knew much less about conditions in the vast steppes stretching to Mongolia and Siberia to their east. What would I do? I’d go west because: my family is starving; I know how long it will take to get there; I don’t know what conditions I might find moving east; and what little I do know isn’t good.
• The lowered temperatures (shorter growing seasons) and drought (less river drainage from the Zagros Mountains) would have reduced yields from Ubaid river-irrigated wheat and barley farming.
• Both steppes nomads and Ubaid farmers would likely have suffered more sickness (and plagues) with the onset of longer winters and food shortages as higher populations fed by the preceding Cornucopia now faced insufficient shares of the decreasing crop yield.  This is the Malthusian conundrum, which population studies illustrate as in the population density graph below (see posts 102 and 125 and lookup “population density” and “population collapse” in this site’s Search Bar in the upper right corner of each page).

Population Density  vs Time

(primary proxy: seeds and pollen in lake sediments)

For purposes of my novel, I draw the following conclusions:

• The Botai and other eastern steppes tribes are too far east to migrate west to Europe, given that much closer relief was known to be available to the south. In fact, the Indo-Europeans did migrate south and formed the Hittites, Luwians, Mittani, and Indo-European speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. I decided that steppes herdsman would find that conditions along the Elburz Mountains, the riverine foothills on the south slopes of the Zagros Mountains, the plain of Susa, the lake country that existed in what is now SE Iran, and southern Mesopotamia were just dandy.
• The Ubaid culture was, in one way or another, incapable of adapting to the urgent needs of its overgrown population in the drought, and probably bleeding population or being conquered (there are many ways to supplant) by the succeeding, aggressive Uruk culture.
• The nascent and expansionary Uruk culture (check out their work at Hamoukar) look to me like the regicidal offspring of the Ubaid.
• The coming upheaval of this arena was long building, but the catalyst for the change was the 5.9 Kya weather event.

That’s enough for today.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke