Last week, I bogged down as I tried to drill deeper into the beginnings of civilization in Crete.

This video helped me realize the misty prehistory of Crete cannot be studied without regard to what was simultaneously going on elsewhere in recorded history. Specifically, the 4.2 Kya Event was bringing down historically recorded mega-civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and the ripple effects of those dislocated and desperate people would affect Crete—and apparently did so in the period when Minoan Crete was growing roots. This extraneous data is irrelevant? Hardly.

This video sharpened my perception of all the moving parts in a long-range view of prehistory which must pass through the 3- to 5-millennium lens of subsequent history. I apologize for springing a concept like “ontology (information science)” upon you, but its definition and nuances now sharpen my view as I ponder the “dark age” that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations in the Cyclades, eastern Mediterranean, and Levant 3.2 Kya.

This muddle over immigrant streams and other external factors became acute as I finished writing and began final editing my novel set during the collapse of the Ubaid following the 5.9 Kya event.

I’m coming to realize the enormous number of external tributaries of cause-and-effect which shape that muddled and misty transition from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. My story is fiction, and the professional archaeological setting and material culture of the Ubaid is—to put it mildly, yet sympathetically—on the fringe of fiction. So I’ve felt free to take a few liberties in selecting the catalyst. But I cannot avoid concluding the Ubaid vanished because they couldn’t adapt to a profoundly and rapidly changing environment.

Finally, 1600 years after the fall of the Ubaid, I throw into the pot the simultaneous collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the Akkadian Empire, and the 3rd Dynasty of Ur during the 4.2 Kya Event—the time when Crete started its palace culture.

Hidden in our future are similar discontinuities like these, all brought about by radical changes of Nature and its secondary effects.

Now returning to my scientific roots e.g. examining the volatility of earth’s temperature over the past 500,000 years and the similar volatility during the Holocene (both in my first post in 2014) I laugh at the hypothesized impact of anthropogenic effects upon climate, and see that man’s experience from natural (providential) events vastly overshadows anything we do.

I can again center my gyros, ignore the visual distractions, and fly by my instruments through today’s storm.

Thanks for visiting,

Rick