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A funerary monument from Egypt's First Intermediate Period, ca. 2050 B.C. Some researchers believe a megadrought that occurred 4,200 years ago caused the Old Kingdom to collapse, ushering in the First Intermediate Period.
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About 4,200 years ago, a catastrophic worldwide drought caused the collapse of societies all over the globe. That’s an archaeological theory linked with the newest division of geological time, dubbed the Meghalayan Age.
But in a new article in Science, Guy Middleton, a senior researcher at the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University, throws cold water on the concept. According to Middleton, the new age isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s what you need to know.
What’s the Meghalayan Age?
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s no surprise: The age was only recently defined. The youngest, newest unit of the geologic time scale, it was adopted earlier this year by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), a subcommittee of the International Union of Geographic Sciences that focuses on defining the geologic time scale. With the decision, the ICS split the current geological epoch that began about 11,650 years ago—the Holocene— into three parts. The Meghalayan Age is the newest sliver of that time scale, running from 4,200 years ago until the present day.
The geologic time scale is reflected in in layers of rock, or geologic strata. After years of debate, geologists adopted the Meghalayan Age based on evidence of a climatic event occurring 4,200 years ago. The best evidence of the event—a sudden, global megadrought, (a drought that lasts two decades or longer)—can be found in chemical signatures in a stalagmite in a cave in the Indian state of Meghalaya; hence the name.
How did the megadrought affect humans?
The drought significantly impacted civilizations all over the world, says archaeologist Harvey Weiss, a professor of Near Eastern Civilizations in Yale University’s anthropology department and an author of the 2012 ICS paper that initially proposed the establishment of the Meghalayan Age. “The megadrought had profound societal effects,” says Weiss. Cities and towns were abandoned, and people transitioned from urban to rural societies.
Some of the civilizations Weiss says were severely impacted by the megadrought include Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, which both collapsed, as well as the Indus Valley of modern-day Pakistan and India, where large cities like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were abandoned around this time.
Video: Scientists Declare A New 'Meghalayan Age,' And We’re Living In It Right Now (GeoBeats)
Did it really have that big of an effect?
Middleton doesn’t think so. In his reading of the archaeological evidence, societal collapses happened at different times, rendering the argument that a single, global climate event precipitated them moot. “I don’t think you have a real regional picture," he says.
In Egypt, the “collapse” of the Old Kingdom was really a slow fragmenting of centralized power, Middleton writes in his Science article. In the Indus Valley, he claims, the society did move away from urban centers, but only over a long period of time.
“The idea that the collapse of a society can be put down to one simple reason ignores people’s agency,” he says. Middleton doesn’t even like the term. “’Collapse’ is a bit of a weasel term,” he explains. “Things aren’t usually as simple as climate change equals collapse.” More often, Middleton says, societies would have reorganized.
Middleton also casts doubt on the dates relied on by the working group, noting that societies like the Akkadian Empire, whose capital has never been located, cannot be precisely dated, and therefore may have occurred during the drought itself.
What do the researchers agree on?
The only point of agreement between Weiss and Middleton seems to be the resilience that causes humans to regroup—whether they do so in response to a societal collapse or not. For Weiss, societal collapses were accompanied by a scramble away from drought and toward self-reinvention. And what Middleton sees as societal reorganizations, not collapses, were driven by human resilience, not “ancient apocalypse.”
Both men insist that their views are widely accepted. “The editors at the journal Science, strangely enough, think this is ‘scientific controversy,’” says Weiss.
“From where I sit,” says Middleton, “my views are not really controversial at all.”
