Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?
livescience.com
livescience.com
It has also caused a refugee crisis as people can't get food or water and flee their nation to go some place else to live.
It has also allowed terrorists to rise up in Syria and Iraq and take over weakened cities that had water sources dry up and people left unable to defend those cities from takeover by terrorists.
So I imagine back during the Ice Age, people moved around as well as struggled to survive. Some lost their food and water sources and turned to warfare on other tribes to survive. People who hung out in southern Europe where the climate was not too bad had a better chance of survival than people who lived on ice sheets up north.
More people means more demand for water.
Relative to now, yes it most certainly was.
Of course, the time when Iraq did that shortly before the decade in question, he had just spent nearly a decade involved in another invasion of a neighboring country -- with the full support of the US, which even rushed to publicly support Iraq when international pressure arose over their use of chemical weapons. So, its not exactly a mystery where he got the idea he could just invade neighboring countries with no consequences.
IIRC, an apparently poorly considered remark by US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie on the US position on Saddam's dispute with Kuwait was a biggie.
The joke, and maybe the truth, about the Dick Cheney remark that there was "no doubt" Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was that, of course he had such weapons (poison gas) and of course we knew he had them because we "still had the receipts" from when we sold that gas to him. Of course we wanted Saddam to use that gas against Iran.
IMHO it now appears that Dick Cheney, the neo-cons, etc., had an idea about the world and, especially, Iraq:
(1) Saddam was a bad guy. So, push on him, and if he doesn't obey, then invade him. We pushed; Saddam didn't obey; W and Co. invaded him in Gulf War II.
(2) Then part of the idea was W's statement "The Iraqi people are perfectly capable of governing themselves.". So, with such thinking, the US rushed to set up a government -- democratic, constitutional, parliamentary, secular.
Apparently the US expectation was that quickly the US would leave and Iraq would be liberated, free, relatively independent, peaceful, prosperous from the oil, and a buddy of the US.
Then a reality check set in: Oops, nope. Instead we learned what Saddam had warned us about, that we would have one heck of a time holding Iraq together. Saddam, with Stalinist techniques, had held Iraq together, but without Saddam what we did there just let the place come apart.
Apart? Nearly every street thug, gang leader, ambitious politician or cleric, international opportunist, etc. saw the fertile ground and started up. Soon there was the insurgency, i.e., something between just chaos and a civil war.
A big trigger? One of the first things the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, did was to disband Saddam's army. Hmm .... That army had ballpark 7 million men. Let's see: IIRC, Iraq had ballpark 35 million people so 17.5 million males. So, the 7 million men was essentially all the men of military age in the country -- all of them. Hmm.
So, right away Bremer just put all 7 million on the streets, broke. Uh, maybe we might have thought a little about just why Saddam had those 7 million men in his army? Maybe mostly to keep them under his control and off the streets?
In particular, as the army was disbanded, Saddam's huge weapons supplies were left unguarded, then stolen, then used in the insurgency, e.g., as roadside bombs that killed/injured a lot of US soldiers.
The main reason for the insurgency? There are three main populations in Iraq, Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. They all hate each other. At least the Sunnis and Shiites have been at war with each other for over 1000 years.
And now, Iraq is essentially partitioned into Kurd, Sunni, and Shiite areas.
The Shiites have Baghdad and south and east from there to Iran, the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
The Sunnis have the area north and west of Baghdad and extending into northern Syria, and that Sunni area is mostly under the control of fundamentalist, medieval, brutal, angry, hostile, ambitious ISIS.
The Kurds have their areas, mostly on both sides of the border of Turkey.
Iran? Shiite.
Saudi Arabia? Sunni.
Assad in Syria? A branch of Shiite.
The rebels in Syria? Sunni.
The civil war in Syria? Apparently just another chapter of the 1000+ year old Sunni-Shiite war.
What's different since 100 years ago? There used to be a lot of desert and not much money or many people -- few people, poor, separated. Now with the oil money, the desert is still there but there is lots of money and many more people. So, the old Sunni-Shiite war can draw lots more blood.
So, that's what W, Cheney, the neo-cons, Wolfowitz, and Bremer took the US into. They were going to dump Saddam, set up a secular democracy friendly with the the US, and leave, all quickly. Lots of thugs quickly saw the fatal flaws, but W and Co. didn't.
So, the US spent lots of precious US blood and treasure chasing the dreams of Cheney, W, etc.
Lesson? If the US wants to play a role in a swamp, then it needs to understand the reptiles -- snakes, alligators, etc. Else, can get bitten by the snakes and alligators.
I would say this was a nitpick, but given the sibling response its perhaps a more important correction, the three main groupings around which identity politics, etc., work in Iraq are:
Sunni Arabs, Shi'ite Arabs, and Kurds.
The "Arab" modifier matters, because the Kurds are mostly Sunni, but are not (in terms of political identity) aligned with the Sunni Arabs.
So, here we illustrate: I don't know even the players on the field. But likely neither did W, Cheney, etc.
So, we reinforce my point: The US should stay the hack out of places it doesn't understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Straw man arguments don't help, either.
ps. you may have meant "exacerbate".
Not the only factor, but one of the factors.
Although he may spin it a little further than it is worth, in fact before all the latest events of the last several years started, the Middle East was the area determined to be most at risk of a "major war" specifically because of issues with international water rights, water amounts & the worsening effect climate change was having on it.
It was boring think-tank material, not the stuff you read in the paper every day, but it was a top concern among people who considered long-term policy.
It's very much a picture of the drought causing people to move to overstretched towns and cities to look for work, and rising discontent with their government as a result. In some areas, mercenary work might be the only paid work available.
It’s that they promote a kind of climate reductionism, one
that carries echoes of the deterministic theories that were
once popular during the second half of the 19th century.
Consider, for instance, John William Draper’s History of
the American Civil War, published in 1867. Draper, who
served as president of the medical college of New York
University from 1850 to 1873, was a professor of chemistry
and an architect of the so-called “conflict model” of
science and religion, bringing a scientist’s eye to his
task. On the very first page of his book, he announced “the
great truth that societies advance in a preordained and
inevitable course” guided by “uncontrollable causes.” Chief
among these was the climate.
Such wholesale migrations have been the cause of many conflicts. Steppe nomads have migrated to Europe on many occasions over the last two thousand years and each time it has led to war. Even within Europe this sort of migration was observed. For example, Julius Caesar fought Germanic tribes who had decided to migrate to Gaul because the grass was greener on that side of the Rhine.
The climate change adepts will argue with you on this one, as human induced (micro)climate change is still considered a climate change.
It is however not the only reason.
Climate change.
Think about how many times you control your local micro climate around you. Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever.
It's a big force in the human condition.
About as many as the moments in which we have to talk with somebody but lack something better to break the ice!
__________
P.S.: I've read so far about a number of possible cases for which humans started to walk upright and none had climate change as a primary cause.
It could be climate change, but that doesnt explain anything, since its so far reaching and general.
Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.
> Maybe this latest global warming/climate change, is not the first time humans had an impact on climate? Its certainly not the first time any species had an impact on climate, looking at you cyanobacteria.
Wasnt the Sahara a swamp pre-agriculture?
Also, the "pre-agriculture = low population" is just a speculation, it could have been far higher population in some areas and we wouldnt have any evidence for it today. See for example Americas before conquestadors, there were areas with millions of people, and not all doing agriculture or even horticulture.
The best areas which could have supported a very high population have been destroyed, all the best areas were taken by "civilized" war people, and now the only nomads/hunter gatherers left are in far-reached shitty areas.
A fact of the matter is that a lot of evolution is driven by constantly changing climates. The supervolcanos and asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs also did so through climate change: too much dust in the air and too little sunlight made the land colder, killed much of the plants, and made resources more scarce. Small warm-blooded animals suddenly had the edge.
It is a bit of a catch-all, though. Just "climate change" doesn't tell you much. Receding glaciers and more accessible land tells you a lot more.
No -- if you read their arguments more closely, what they suspect is that some populations were able to adapt to sudden climate change, while others were not.
So really, it's about adaptability.
Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that wiped out anyone it contacted and the separation of the 2 groups (N and M) in different locations protected enough of the N group for it to prosper. Also isolated pockets of M carriers who had migrated beyond the infected area survived.
This sounds so familiar! "The previous local populations just vanished and we, the current inhabitants, had nothing to do with it, cross my heart!"
The dramatic change should have been very beneficial to the hunter-gatherers. They survived so long in tundra but they somehow couldn't cope with the abundance of plants and plant eating venison brought along? Come on! It's more likely that the previous harsh conditions weren't that inviting for the better hunters of N type super-haplogroup living somewhere else, and as soon as that changed so did the hunting lands' owners!
In fact, this is so inevitable we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-likely scenarios?
The colonization of Americas is the perfect counter-example for disease wipe-out explanation. Pre-Columbian American population had no immunity whatsoever to a bunch of serious diseases (some of which managed to become pandemics back in colonizer's homelands), diseases that have accumulated over millennia (since the last Bering overland/over-ice human crossing)! You'd expect that on first Columbian contacts there should have appeared a pandemic so severe over the whole Americas that after a few years the Europeans should have had no one alive to encounter! Not only they still encountered, but long after the first contact they also had a hard time dealing with local resistance of underdeveloped tribes which had worse medical conditions than what was to be had in ancient Rome! Not only that locals haven't been wiped out, but they managed to contribute in a large quote to nowadays's Ibero-America's genotype despite the European settlers' massive migration! So yes, I think it's enough reason to consider the disease a less likely cause for a continental scale wipe-out (which is what the article was talking about).
We'll never really know the depth of native culture pre-Columbian because of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A