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New report could show climate shaping human history

Time and again, scholars have pointed out the frightening potential impacts of climate change on human civilizations, linking global warming to everything from forced migration to outbreaks of war. And while such effects are a growing concern in today’s warming world, research now increasingly suggests that previous civilizations were likely molded by a shifting climate as well.

A new paper, just published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, proposes a link between a marked cooling event in the fifth and sixth centuries AD and a period of dramatic social change across Europe and Asia, including a pandemic plague outbreak, food shortages, political turmoil in China, migrations and even the rise of the Islamic empire. It’s impossible to say for sure whether the climatic shift was actually responsible for all the upheaval that went on during that time, the researchers say – but since the two periods coincided, the scientists are proposing that a connection is likely.

“There are a lot of things that occurred at the same time, and now it’s certainly very difficult to disentangle to what degree was it caused by climatic fluctuations,” said the study’s lead author, Ulf Büntgen , who heads a research group specializing in tree-ring science at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. “But we just cannot exclude it anymore.”



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