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Why a Thriving Civilization in Malta Collapsed 4,000 Years Ago
The Ġgantija temples of Malta are among the earliest free-standing buildings known. Photo credit: Bs0u10e01 / Wikicommons.
The mysteries of an ancient civilization that survived for more than a millennium on the island of Malta—and then collapsed within two generations—have been unravelled by archaeologists who analyzed pollen buried deep within the earth and ancient DNA from skulls and bones. It’s part of a field of work that is expanding the use of archaeological techniques into environments where they were previously thought to be unusable.
The Temple Culture of the Maltese archipelago in the Mediterranean began nearly 6,000 years ago and at its height probably numbered several thousand people—far denser than the people of mainland Europe could manage at the time. The island people constructed elaborate sacred sites, such as the famous Ġgantija temple complex, and their buildings are among the earliest free-standing buildings known. But, after 1,500 years, they were gone.
Islands can be used as laboratories for understanding change in the wider world.
Caroline Malone, prehistory specialist at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, wanted to understand how the fragile island ecology sustained the people for so long despite drought, violent storms, and soil erosion—and why it ultimately failed. She ran an ambitious project, Fragsus, which drew on multiple tools to find some answers. Scientists drilled earth cores ranging from eight to 30 meters deep, dating the sediment using carbon dating to understand which time period it referred to. They counted the pollen at two-centimeter intervals and analyzed individual pollen grains using chemical signatures imprinted by the surrounding environment to understand what nutrients the parent plants were absorbing from the ground. Molluscs embedded in the soil revealed glimpses of the landscape since “snails,” Malone said, “are very particular about where they live and don’t move far.”
Meanwhile, other specialists assessed the wear and tear on tens of thousands of human bones from a burial site to understand the islanders’ lifestyles. The team broke new ground by analyzing bone with a technique called ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis, says Malone. It had previously been thought that the warmth of any climate south of the Alps would destroy such old DNA. But it turned out that skulls buried at a relatively cool five meters’ depth still harbored aDNA within thick bone behind the ear.
From what they’ve uncovered, the team thinks that these people understood the importance of soil management to fend off starvation. Within a hundred years of their arrival on the tiny, 316 square-kilometer archipelago they had felled most of the trees, exposing the ground to drastic erosion.
To survive, they reared dairy animals rather than prioritizing meat—killing off newborn livestock before they had a chance to graze. They mixed livestock manure back into the soil and may even have made back-breaking journeys carting soil washed into the valleys back uphill to refresh the upland fields. The evidence for this lies in strange, parallel ruts in the ground that may be cart tracks, as well as signs from the skeletons that soft tissue had sometimes been worn completely away by hard, repetitive activity. Oddly, says Malone, they ate almost no fish.
To achieve such complex collaborative effort something powerful must have held the community together: the temples. Until now, the Temple Culture was thought to have centered on the worship of a mother goddess, but Malone thinks it was more of a clubhouse culture, focused on ritual and feasting but where food—rather than a deity—was revered. In the complexes it is now clear that the people displayed their livestock and harvests on special benches and altars, feasted, and also stored food. There is no skeletal evidence of violent death and no fortifications, said Malone. Instead the society appears to have survived through cooperation and sharing.
Despite the society’s strength and success, as centuries passed the soil erosion and climate conditions worsened, as evidenced by the different types of pollen in the soil, the diminishing number of tree remains and the human bones wracked with evidence of dietary deficiencies. In the final centuries of the Temple Culture, between 2600 BC and 2400 BC, half of those dying were children. Other factors likely contributed, said Malone. Adult skulls from this time are greatly varied, their DNA indicating the arrival of immigrants from as far as the Eurasian Steppes and sub-Saharan Africa, possibly causing population pressure and new diseases.
The decisive blow may have been an unknown catastrophe that occurred around 2350 BC, a period during which, according to tree ring analysis, the whole region suffered a catastrophic climate event—possibly a dust cloud caused by a volcanic eruption.
Palaeo environmental DNA in sediment cores is providing a long term perspective of how Spain’s Canary Islands weathered past climate change. Photo credit: Lea de Nascimento.
Islands can be used as laboratories for understanding change in the wider world, Malone says. However, the geographical peculiarities of islands can also present problems by rendering conventional research techniques redundant. In Spain’s Canary Islands, for example, ancient pollen is not well-preserved in the local terrain. What’s more, many important plants on the islands—such as its emblematic laurel trees—produce no, or little, pollen, and the environmental conditions have also eroded other pieces of evidence, such as macrofossils.
Lea de Nascimento, a specialist in ecology at the Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife said: “We lack (good preservation of) all the conventional proxies.” She wants to piece together the history of vegetation on the Canaries—in particular, what they were like before humans arrived over 2,000 years ago. To do so, she is using a new palaeoecological technique called palaeoenvironmental DNA analysis.
“If you have a long perspective you will know the resilience of ecosystems.”
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is left in soil or water by microorganisms, plant and animal species, and scientists increasingly scan for it to find out what’s going on in today’s environment. It is a relatively new palaeoecological tool, which has so far been used in the coldest and driest places because of its vulnerability to warmth and humidity. But de Nascimento is now probing for it in core samples spanning several thousand years from the islands.
For the ISLANDPALECO project, she has spent two years learning from experts at a dedicated laboratory in New Zealand how to search for palaeo environmental DNA in sediment cores. After a year of setbacks, she has now found 100-year-old DNA of a much richer variety than can be found in the pollen record. She is still hoping to retrieve older palaeo environmental DNA. “If you have a long perspective you will know the resilience of ecosystems,” she said. “It will help us understand how an ecosystem will react if we keep putting pressure on it in the future—or in response to climate change.” She says that knowing more about past ecosystems will also help today’s conservationists restore landscapes depleted by humans and the animals they brought with them. “The problem,” she said, “is you could invest a lot of money restoring an ecosystem that was never there.”
Credit: Graphic Horizon.
Aisling Irwin is a journalist specializing in science, environment, and development. The research in this article was funded by the EU and it was originally published on Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine.
60 Comments on "Why a Thriving Civilization in Malta Collapsed 4,000 Years Ago"
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 11:07 am
America and Britain are the Big Losers on the World Stage
“Lockdowns are unnecessary if the use of masks is practiced by 95 per cent of the population, says Dr Hans Kluge, the World Health Organisation’s European chief. This is good to know, though it is a pity that the WHO did not make the point more forcefully in March as the pandemic was exploding across Europe and the world.
The necessity for face masks had been expressed at the time, but the advice to use them came from a source that European and American leaders dismissed as politically unacceptable.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/24/america-and-britain-are-the-big-losers-on-the-world-stage/
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 11:20 am
East Coast residents have ‘false sense of security’ about threats from invading saltwater
“On Long Island in New York, testing for the first time shows saltwater reaching deeply into a drinking-water aquifer on the southern shore, evidence of trouble coming from an invisible flood of salt driven by climate change.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported in September that Long Island groundwater, which 3 million people rely on, is much more contaminated by saltwater than it previously theorized. One test near Jamaica Bay in Long Island’s Nassau County showed water nearly as salty as the ocean.”
https://cnsmaryland.org/2020/11/23/east-coast-residents-have-false-sense-of-security-about-threats-from-invading-saltwater/
zero juan on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 11:54 am
Ppee got his clock cleaned over on the moderated side so what does he do, he turns on the rapid fire sock spam. LMFAO! Yea, fuck, I wiped you clean on the moderated side. Everyone hates you juanPpee!
FamousDrScanlon said East Coast residents have ‘false sense of security…
OutcastPhilosopher said @fuckthisworld Yep this shithouse is going up in f…
FamousDrScanlon said America and Britain are the Big Losers on the Worl…
FamousDrScanlon said Early Warning Signs of Global Warming: Downpours,…
FuckThisWorld said OutcastPhilosopher » Wed 25 Nov 2020, 12:24:01 htt…
bochen787 said
OutcastPhilosopher said JuanP, what should I say next?
HelloStarvingLion said Hello starvinglion. You have to go showel snow. Ho…
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 3:39 pm
Ice Storm in Russia’s Far East Linked to Climate Change
“The storm that hit the Primorye region and its capital of Vladivostok last Thursday brought down trees and power lines and covered outdoor surfaces in thick ice, prompting a regional state of emergency. The weather phenomenon 6,500 kilometers east of Moscow follows an abnormally mild and snowless winter in 2019 that scientists also attributed to climate change.
Last week’s snow and ice storm in Vladivostok was “a direct result of climate change,” Roman Pukalov, director of environmental programs at the Green Patrol NGO, told The Moscow Times.
“This is a direct result of exceptionally warm temperatures in the Primorye region this fall” where thermostats usually hit zero degrees Celsius in early October, Pukalov said. “Temperatures only just dropped below zero and brought this freezing rain with them.”
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/11/23/ice-storm-in-russias-far-east-linked-to-climate-change-a72123
Climate deniers are so fucking dumb they think the hydrologic cycle is a water powered bicycle.
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 3:48 pm
Coastal farmers being driven off their land as salt poisons the soil
“CHAMP, Md. — Eric Bedsworth’s day of reckoning arrived a year ago.
His soybean field got such a salty soaking from last fall’s tidal waters that he abandoned it mid-harvest. This season, the land sprouts only weeds. Unless researchers create a salt-tolerant crop to his liking, Bedsworth likely never will plant this soggy field again.
“I hate to see the land go out of production. But I’ve lost so much money down there,” said Bedsworth, a third-generation farmer in Somerset County, Maryland.
His is a fate farmers increasingly confront amid rising seas and punishing storms, according to a study by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.
Thousands of acres have been abandoned on the Eastern Shore peninsula that lies between the ocean and Chesapeake Bay, spanning three states. The long-farmed land was “the breadbasket of the revolution.”
Nearby, Bob Fitzgerald also took a field out of production.
“I quit farming it because it drowned out every damned year,” said Fitzgerald, 81, whose family has farmed in Somerset County since the mid-17th Century.
Surveying a salt-scarred patch in another field, he summed up the plight of many farmers: “It’s an issue that’s here and going to stay and we’re going to have to live with it.”
https://cnsmaryland.org/2020/11/23/coastal-farmers-being-driven-off-their-land-as-salt-poisons-the-soil/
Now American farmers are in league with the Chinese climate hoax to destroy the 17 remaining good manufacturing jobs.
Sumbuddy call Trump. He’ll expose those libtard deep-state farmer-operatives.
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 5:33 pm
Record-shattering Warmth Pushes Arctic Temperatures to 12 Degrees F Above Normal
“Even as winter darkness descends across the Arctic, a year of record-breaking heat continues. Temperatures last weekend across the entire Arctic basin hit 12 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, scientists announced, with some areas measuring as high as 30 degrees F or more above the norm.
These extraordinary temperatures come on the heels of an exceptionally warm summer and fall in the Arctic that saw temperatures exceed 100 degrees F above the Arctic Circle in Siberia and cause an unprecedented delay in the Arctic Ocean refreezing this autumn. Indeed, the Northeast Passage along the Siberian coast remained navigable this year for a record 112 days until the route finally froze over earlier this month. That 112-day span shattered the previous record by about a month.
Satellite measurements show that the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean was the lowest ever recorded in October. That followed a September in the Arctic in which the sea ice minimum was the second-lowest on record since satellite monitoring began in 1979.”
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/record-shattering-warmth-pushes-arctic-temperatures-to-12-degrees-f-above-normal
Fucked beyond belief. Mass human die-back or human extinction before this century is out.
AGW alone would do it except it’s not the only predicament. The ongoing genocide of biodiversity is just as deadly.
The human response/knock on effects will result in untold carnage since fire apes lose their shit big time when faced with existential threats like your family will starve unless you kill the competition.
Nuke war is likely & would be a fitting end for the fire apes.
There’s no choice in a universe where thermodynamics is god.
Few will ever get past their (hardwired) illusion of choice, but there are more who have than is talked about because determinism is a terrorizing taboo. Only death is more taboo(slightly) than determinism.
“That, Green New Deal, may be your biggest fault line. But you know, overall, you give me the idea that you don’t understand the territory you’re operating in. You’re just saying stuff that you think people will believe in and follow. Like Trump or Hillary or any politicians do.
Best rest assured, we haven’t even started yet. There’s still the trifle little matter of how all systems, all organisms, deal with energy (sources). Now, according to Alfred J. Lotka and Howard T. Odum, in what they and others have labeled the 4th law of Thermodynamics, all systems and organisms of necessity (DNA/RNA driven) seek to maximize their use of energy, for pure survival reasons: the one that’s most efficient in its ability to exploit and utilize -external- energy sources will survive. (another word for this is: Life)
And then you say you must use less energy? Or you want to shift from oil to energy sources with less density, like solar or wind? Be careful, because this says you’re putting your odds of survival at risk.
This is what my teacher Jay Hanson, who tragically died earlier this year before I ever had the chance to meet him, said about this in 2013:
Today, when one observes the many severe environmental and social problems, it appears that we are rushing towards extinction and are powerless to stop it. Why can’t we save ourselves? To answer that question we only need to integrate three of the key influences on our behavior: 1) biological evolution, 2) overshoot, and 3) a proposed fourth law of thermodynamics called the “Maximum Power Principle” (MPP). The MPP states that biological systems will organize to increase power generation, by degrading more energy, whenever systemic constraints allow it.
Biological evolution is a change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. Individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic (DNA/RNA, etc.) material from one generation to the next.
“Natural selection” is one of the basic mechanisms of evolution, along with mutation, migration, and drift. Natural selection explains the appearance of design in the living world, and “inclusive fitness theory” explains what this design is for. Specifically, natural selection leads organisms to become adapted as if to maximize their inclusive fitness. The “fittest” individuals are those who succeed in generating more power and reproducing more copies of their genes than their competitors.
You’re in tricky territory, guys. Reversing the history of (wo)mankind or the system that gave birth to her/him is not easy. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly very hard. You’d have to go against the DNA/RNA embedded in you, and then rephrase it at a molecular level. Like you all, I have certain -perhaps illogical- hopes that it can be done, but my hopes are not high. How do you beat nature? And would you really want to if you could?
There’s so much more to say on the topic of energy, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave it at this for now. I’ll get back to it soon. Of course I understand that the jump from Greta and AOC to “Maximum Power Principle” is a big one, but for some people perhaps that’s just what they need. And for others it’s not, I get that. But it’s still what it is.”
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2019/10/energy-vs-dna/
..
Read at the end how frustrated Raúl Ilargi gets with his readers comments on everything BUT determinism (MPP). They are avoiding it like the Black Death. Their primitive limbic system (emotion) trumps their neocortex (logic & reason) 99.9999% of the time. LMFAO.
“The only approach that makes any sense, is to use and consume vastly less ‘energy’. From a rational point of view, that would seem an easy thing to do: it should be possible to transport yourself at a higher efficiency rate than 0.5%. But at the same time, that’s not at all what we are doing.
We, like all organisms, are obeying the Maximum Power Principle: we grab all the energy we can, and we use it in whatever way we can. Got to be a bit careful with the term “we” perhaps, if only because if by some miracle we might drastically reduce our energy consumption, which physics says should be no problem -though biology might disagree-, we would leave a lot of oil, or other energy forms, available to for instance the Chinese, who could use it against us.
Very much a part of the Maximum Power Principle: competition between species leads to maximum ‘power grabs’ (for survival), but also competition within species (same reason). What you have in your possession, they do not.
I very much welcome any and all thoughts and contributions and disagreements on this topic. But do note I’ve been on it for many years.”
– November 7, 2019 at 8:12 pm
“I see no essential responses to my article at all in the Comments, like nothing I say has any weight, I see only people retreating into their own old trenches. The Model T Ford or the 2CV have nothing to do with what I wrote. I can expect that in many other venues the article will be published in, but right here it is disappointing. Here, your can disagree as much as you want, but you’re going to need some logic.” – Raúl Ilargi Meijer
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2019/11/energy-vs-waste/
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 7:43 pm
Growing ‘heat blob’ from Atlantic driving sea ice loss in Arctic, study says
Amount of ocean heat delivered to the Arctic has increased markedly since 2001, according to research
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/arctic-sea-ice-atlantic-ocean-b1760392.html
Anyone planning on giving their kids or grandkids a cash inheritance best give it to them now before that hothouse extinction inheritance we’ve triggered kills them.
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 7:49 pm
Why Moscow’s snowless winters are a warning to the world
Russia’s warming climate has left it unmoored of its cultural foundations.
“In 2018 a long, glorious summer stretched unnervingly into October. Winter, when it came, was mild, flirting only occasionally with -10. The next year, winter never really came at all. Instead, Moscow fell into an extended six-month autumn, and an inescapable sense that something was terribly wrong.
That December was snow-free for the first time in living memory. Rain fell in January, a month when the mercury wouldn’t ordinarily rise much over -15. In February, bears emerged early from hibernation and flowers began to bloom. By March, the world’s coldest and northernmost megacity was bounding into another sweltering summer.”
” In theory, none of this should be surprising. Russia’s northern latitude and continental geography mean it is warming at a rate two-and-a-half times higher the rest of the planet, perhaps the fastest of any country. In parts of the Arctic, average temperature anomalies have started hitting three degrees above the historical norm. Already Russia is settling into vicious climate feedback loops, for example where melting permafrost reveals darker land and water surfaces beneath, which in turn absorb more of the sun’s heat, locking in accelerated future warming. In the acrid summer of 2020 alone, burning Arctic forests emitted around the same amount of carbon as Egypt does in a year.
The science fails to communicate a deeper truth: that something fundamental to Russia and Russian-ness is being irretrievably lost. In a country persistently protesting over chemical run-off in Lake Baikal and landfill sites in the Arctic, the vanishing winter commands curiously little attention. Individual, concrete episodes of environmental degradation are much easier to grapple with than the creeping transformation of the atmosphere.”
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2020/11/why-moscow-s-snowless-winters-are-warning-world
FamousDrScanlon on Wed, 25th Nov 2020 7:56 pm
“Just two weeks after making history with the warmest stretch of sustained temperatures ever recorded in November, the City of Toronto is once again boasting a new weather record: This one for a heck ton of snow.
Toronto was hit with a whopping 19.4 cm of snowfall on Sunday, according to Environment Canada, which had previously issued a weather alert for the region due reduced visibility and rapidly-accumulating precipitation.”
https://www.blogto.com/city/2020/11/what-toronto-looked-after-first-record-setting-snowfall/
For you systems know nothings, swings from one extreme to another within a system in such a short period of time are a bad sign. Indicates destabilization.
plawliphess on Thu, 26th Nov 2020 1:02 am
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