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الصيف الطويل
العدد 340 من سلسلة عالم المعرفة
مؤلف هذا الكتاب براين فاغان عالم إنسانيات و آثار ، و هو يطرح في كتابه ثروة من احدث المعلومات في علوم المناخ و الأرض و الآثار و التاريخ ، ليوضح تأثير المناخ في تاريخ الإنسان و الحضارات منذ عشرات الآلاف من السنين قبل الميلاد. يسرد الكتاب في تسلسل كالرواية بأسلوب مشوق سلس موجه لغير المختصين ، كيف أدى المناخ إلى تراجع العصر الجليدي ليفسح في المجال لجو أدفأ هو الصيف الطويل الذي مازلنا نعيش فيه الآن.
يتفاعل المناخ مع العوامل الجغرافية و الاقتصادية و الاجتماعية لتنتج في النهاية الثورة الزراعية ، و يتجمع الناس في القرى و المدن ، ثم أقطار متحضرة ، كما في مصر و بين النهرين. كذلك فإن العوامل المناخية من تثليج و تصحر و فيضانات و جفافات لها دورها في انهيار حضارات و دول بأسرها.
يستند الكتاب في ما يسرده إلى أبحاث علم المناخ الجديد ، الذي اصبح يعتمد على وسائل حديثة جدا مثل عينات الحفر العميق في قاع البحار و ألواح الجليد ، الذي أصبح يعتمد اخيرا على وسائل حديثة جدا مثل عينات الحفر العميق في قاع البحار و ألواح الجليد ، و تحليل رواسب المستنقعات ، و غير ذلك من أحدث السبل للاستدلال على تقلبات المناخ و تأريخ زمنها.
مؤلف هذا الكتاب براين فاغان عالم إنسانيات و آثار ، و هو يطرح في كتابه ثروة من احدث المعلومات في علوم المناخ و الأرض و الآثار و التاريخ ، ليوضح تأثير المناخ في تاريخ الإنسان و الحضارات منذ عشرات الآلاف من السنين قبل الميلاد. يسرد الكتاب في تسلسل كالرواية بأسلوب مشوق سلس موجه لغير المختصين ، كيف أدى المناخ إلى تراجع العصر الجليدي ليفسح في المجال لجو أدفأ هو الصيف الطويل الذي مازلنا نعيش فيه الآن.
يتفاعل المناخ مع العوامل الجغرافية و الاقتصادية و الاجتماعية لتنتج في النهاية الثورة الزراعية ، و يتجمع الناس في القرى و المدن ، ثم أقطار متحضرة ، كما في مصر و بين النهرين. كذلك فإن العوامل المناخية من تثليج و تصحر و فيضانات و جفافات لها دورها في انهيار حضارات و دول بأسرها.
يستند الكتاب في ما يسرده إلى أبحاث علم المناخ الجديد ، الذي اصبح يعتمد على وسائل حديثة جدا مثل عينات الحفر العميق في قاع البحار و ألواح الجليد ، الذي أصبح يعتمد اخيرا على وسائل حديثة جدا مثل عينات الحفر العميق في قاع البحار و ألواح الجليد ، و تحليل رواسب المستنقعات ، و غير ذلك من أحدث السبل للاستدلال على تقلبات المناخ و تأريخ زمنها.
310 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2003
35 people are currently reading
2153 people want to read
About the author
Brian M. Fagan
180 books270 followersBrian Murray Fagan was a British author of popular archaeology books and a professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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August 16, 2020If you are interested in systems the argument presented here is intriguing. Societies, Fagan tells us, reacted to the environmental stresses caused by changing climates through increasing complexity. Increasing social or technological complexity, however, carried the seeds of its own destruction through increased risk and greater vulnerability . It is a picture that is a far cry from the relaxed agriculture of Stone Age Economics in which families are happy to operate well below the presumed carrying capacity of the land - though the societies discussed by Sahlin seem to be less complex on the whole than the ones Fagan looks at here.
However complexity enables and drives further population growth until the system exceeds the environmental carrying capacity. Fagan invokes the Anasazi of the American south-west here, just like Lewin in Complexity, but also the civilisations of the ancient middle-east and Old Kingdom Egypt among others.
I'm fascinated reading this, by the variation in the climate - before 11,000 BC the area of modern Syria was covered in forests dominated by Oak and Pistachio, not just the highlands but today's arid plains too. On the other hand in California the 20th century, it turns out, was unusually wet compared to its climate history as a whole. Over the long term big changes can completely change the environment we have lived in, equally relatively small changes can stress societies to destruction when they have expanded to the maximum their agricultural technology can support.
There is a sense of the abundance of nature, one study showed that a family group could gather enough wild einkorn (an ancestor of modern bread wheat) without sickles, scythes or knives in three weeks to feed themselves for a year but also of the amount of hard work required, visible on the skeletal remains of people (particularly as one might expect those of women), to process some unlikely food stuffs like acorns. One has to marvel at the person who first cracking open and chewing up a bitter acorn decided that it would be worth while grinding it up, then washing the remains in water - a process that would take seven hours of labour - to see if they could make something almost palatable out of it.
It impresses me again to realise what a society can achieve without leaving the stone age. Stone barbed arrows are both sharper, lighter and more damaging than metal equivalents as a researcher found when out hunting with Ishi . Densely populated urban civilisations were made possible not through the use of metals but through raised fields, irrigation and compost.
On the downside this book has a limited scope - sub-Saharan Africa and Asia aren't discussed at all, although there is space for repetition. The maps are scrappy with inaccurate labelling and Fagan writes some odd things. In addition to the five litres of beer he assumes as a standard Egyptian daily ration he states of hunter gatherers that the women would join another group if all their men died in a hunting accident. How bizarre. Firstly it is impossible to know what a hypothetical group of people would have done in such an odd circumstance. If that is what has been known to happen among contemporary or observed hunter gathers then it would be better to have said that. Secondly this curiously destructive hunting accident example conjures up an image of early man insisting on demonstrating just how super sharp his new spear point is with fatal effect on himself and all his fellows. Requiescat in pace, may such enthusiasm never be forgot.
The climate in Fagan's opinion is a major driver of human history. Climate determines what can be grown where and therefore changes to the climate force or enable human adaptation. It's a humbling thesis that puts people in truer proportion to the rest of the natural world.
However complexity enables and drives further population growth until the system exceeds the environmental carrying capacity. Fagan invokes the Anasazi of the American south-west here, just like Lewin in Complexity, but also the civilisations of the ancient middle-east and Old Kingdom Egypt among others.
I'm fascinated reading this, by the variation in the climate - before 11,000 BC the area of modern Syria was covered in forests dominated by Oak and Pistachio, not just the highlands but today's arid plains too. On the other hand in California the 20th century, it turns out, was unusually wet compared to its climate history as a whole. Over the long term big changes can completely change the environment we have lived in, equally relatively small changes can stress societies to destruction when they have expanded to the maximum their agricultural technology can support.
There is a sense of the abundance of nature, one study showed that a family group could gather enough wild einkorn (an ancestor of modern bread wheat) without sickles, scythes or knives in three weeks to feed themselves for a year but also of the amount of hard work required, visible on the skeletal remains of people (particularly as one might expect those of women), to process some unlikely food stuffs like acorns. One has to marvel at the person who first cracking open and chewing up a bitter acorn decided that it would be worth while grinding it up, then washing the remains in water - a process that would take seven hours of labour - to see if they could make something almost palatable out of it.
It impresses me again to realise what a society can achieve without leaving the stone age. Stone barbed arrows are both sharper, lighter and more damaging than metal equivalents as a researcher found when out hunting with Ishi . Densely populated urban civilisations were made possible not through the use of metals but through raised fields, irrigation and compost.
On the downside this book has a limited scope - sub-Saharan Africa and Asia aren't discussed at all, although there is space for repetition. The maps are scrappy with inaccurate labelling and Fagan writes some odd things. In addition to the five litres of beer he assumes as a standard Egyptian daily ration he states of hunter gatherers that the women would join another group if all their men died in a hunting accident. How bizarre. Firstly it is impossible to know what a hypothetical group of people would have done in such an odd circumstance. If that is what has been known to happen among contemporary or observed hunter gathers then it would be better to have said that. Secondly this curiously destructive hunting accident example conjures up an image of early man insisting on demonstrating just how super sharp his new spear point is with fatal effect on himself and all his fellows. Requiescat in pace, may such enthusiasm never be forgot.
The climate in Fagan's opinion is a major driver of human history. Climate determines what can be grown where and therefore changes to the climate force or enable human adaptation. It's a humbling thesis that puts people in truer proportion to the rest of the natural world.
December 31, 2025
اخر قراءة في عام ٢٠٢٥
كانت تجربة دسمة استمرت شهرين ونص تقريبا كاملين
ومحتاج خلفيات كبيرة جغرافية وتاريخية وانثروبولوجية كمان
لكن في المجمل كتاب مفيد كعادة سلسلة عالم المعرفة
رغم صعوبته المرادي بالنسبالي بشكل كبير لانه اعتقد على الجغرافيا والانثروبولوجيا اكتر من الكلام العلمي لتغير المناخ
كل عام وانتم بخير ويا رب العام القادم يكون لميء بالانجازات والقراءات الجميلة المفيدة للجميع 💐❤️
كانت تجربة دسمة استمرت شهرين ونص تقريبا كاملين
ومحتاج خلفيات كبيرة جغرافية وتاريخية وانثروبولوجية كمان
لكن في المجمل كتاب مفيد كعادة سلسلة عالم المعرفة
رغم صعوبته المرادي بالنسبالي بشكل كبير لانه اعتقد على الجغرافيا والانثروبولوجيا اكتر من الكلام العلمي لتغير المناخ
كل عام وانتم بخير ويا رب العام القادم يكون لميء بالانجازات والقراءات الجميلة المفيدة للجميع 💐❤️
July 3, 2018
I enjoyed this look at the progress of humans and then their civilisations, as affected by the climate shifts. For instance we get very visual descriptions of the Sahara (and Gobi later) as expanding with green from extra rainfall on the edges, this green being seized upon by cattle herders while it lasts. This is now observable by satellite. Giraffes and hippos were immortalised in stone paintings in lands that are now desert.
The Fertile Crescent was at one time a good place to grow crops and herd sheep and goats, which the author tells us were the first domesticated animals. How about dogs? I did not find one mention of dogs. These are thought to have been adopted from wolf litters by Ice Age nomadic hunter gatherers who kept them when they turned to herding. Also cats; these were domesticated for rodent catching as long as we had granaries, and what was obviously a pet cat was buried with a child in Cyprus 9,500 years ago.
Early civilisations like Ur and Tell Leilan are discussed, how people came together because there was a surplus of food if they worked together to irrigate and harvest and store. At times the people became dependent on foods like acorns or other tree nuts that took hours to process each day, and this work was left to women, as we see from wear on their bones, from crouching and grinding the nuts. (No mill wheels. Odd how they didn't invent something more efficient.) When long droughts - a hundred years or more - moved the area where trees could thrive, the people had to plant new crops or move. Every time a farmer group up and left, they would now move into a wooded land already peopled.
We learn about the first treks across the Bering Straits, perhaps some of the way by boat, following seals and fish, some by walking as glacial retreat permitted. No mention of the possibility that people walked through a glacial runoff tunnel, literally a tunnel under the ice sheet where melting water had carved long runnels. This is given as a possibility for crossing Alaska, by some studying the Native American myth which says that the first peoples came from an earlier world through a long dark tunnel through the earth to the world they now inhabit.
The Roman world thrived due to warming which pushed the ecotone, the boundary between two climate zones, further north on Europe and allowed much grain, fruit and other crops to be grown. But when the climate shifted the cold further south again the Gauls of Germany were able to descend as the Romans, deprived of harvests and tributes, fell back towards the Mediterranean. Similarly the Egyptians needed the waters of the Nile to provide food and believing this to be gods - sent, they did not take other steps like digging deep wells, just depended on the rains and prayers.
I enjoyed seeing all the sites marked on maps where various settlements are excavated, volcanic dust found and tree rings dated, ice cores examined, to piece together climate and natural occurrences. Even history can be looked at differently once we know that climate allowed many happenings and caused other mishaps.
The early 1300s are the years without summer in Europe. We learn about populations shrinking as harvest failed year after year. But no mention of the later calamity, the Black Death, which was able to spread so easily that century because the population was weakened by having undergone famine and lack of sun in youth. No mention either of the depletion of the Greenland population, a colony of Denmark which was unable to survive the onset of cold and lack of support from the plague-struck mother country.
I was fascinated by the cause of so many cold spells - the sudden flood of freshwater or ice off North America into the North Atlantic. Time after time this occurred as the globe warmed. On one occasion, the waters of the Atlantic spilled over into the Med, which then spilled over the Bosphorous into a large lake which continued to rise to become the Black Sea, probably the Biblical and other mythological Flood as there would have been constant rain, drowning many villages.
No mention of the excavation of the middens of eastern North American Native villages, which depended on elk and left their bones for generations, then started hunting more deer as well, finally deer bones alone, as the trees moved with changing weather. MesoAmerican civilisations are covered, and one in west South America, mainly because they too irrigated and grew crops.
With humans thriving as they produced food and starving as food ran scarce, moving on, the human population has eaten all the wildlife of the world, which now consists of two percent of the animal life on Earth, compared to 98% being humans and their livestock. Today there is nowhere unclaimed to move to, which is why climate migrants are coming to Europe. Today we have poured so much CO2 and other gases into the air that we are artificially warming the world. In the past millions died every time the climate changed. Today we think we should not let that happen, but nor do we do much to stop unsustainable populations from multiplying. I think we need to make food aid dependent upon accepting contraceptive injections, and plant more trees.
I borrowed this book from the Royal Dublin Society Library. This is an unbiased review.
The Fertile Crescent was at one time a good place to grow crops and herd sheep and goats, which the author tells us were the first domesticated animals. How about dogs? I did not find one mention of dogs. These are thought to have been adopted from wolf litters by Ice Age nomadic hunter gatherers who kept them when they turned to herding. Also cats; these were domesticated for rodent catching as long as we had granaries, and what was obviously a pet cat was buried with a child in Cyprus 9,500 years ago.
Early civilisations like Ur and Tell Leilan are discussed, how people came together because there was a surplus of food if they worked together to irrigate and harvest and store. At times the people became dependent on foods like acorns or other tree nuts that took hours to process each day, and this work was left to women, as we see from wear on their bones, from crouching and grinding the nuts. (No mill wheels. Odd how they didn't invent something more efficient.) When long droughts - a hundred years or more - moved the area where trees could thrive, the people had to plant new crops or move. Every time a farmer group up and left, they would now move into a wooded land already peopled.
We learn about the first treks across the Bering Straits, perhaps some of the way by boat, following seals and fish, some by walking as glacial retreat permitted. No mention of the possibility that people walked through a glacial runoff tunnel, literally a tunnel under the ice sheet where melting water had carved long runnels. This is given as a possibility for crossing Alaska, by some studying the Native American myth which says that the first peoples came from an earlier world through a long dark tunnel through the earth to the world they now inhabit.
The Roman world thrived due to warming which pushed the ecotone, the boundary between two climate zones, further north on Europe and allowed much grain, fruit and other crops to be grown. But when the climate shifted the cold further south again the Gauls of Germany were able to descend as the Romans, deprived of harvests and tributes, fell back towards the Mediterranean. Similarly the Egyptians needed the waters of the Nile to provide food and believing this to be gods - sent, they did not take other steps like digging deep wells, just depended on the rains and prayers.
I enjoyed seeing all the sites marked on maps where various settlements are excavated, volcanic dust found and tree rings dated, ice cores examined, to piece together climate and natural occurrences. Even history can be looked at differently once we know that climate allowed many happenings and caused other mishaps.
The early 1300s are the years without summer in Europe. We learn about populations shrinking as harvest failed year after year. But no mention of the later calamity, the Black Death, which was able to spread so easily that century because the population was weakened by having undergone famine and lack of sun in youth. No mention either of the depletion of the Greenland population, a colony of Denmark which was unable to survive the onset of cold and lack of support from the plague-struck mother country.
I was fascinated by the cause of so many cold spells - the sudden flood of freshwater or ice off North America into the North Atlantic. Time after time this occurred as the globe warmed. On one occasion, the waters of the Atlantic spilled over into the Med, which then spilled over the Bosphorous into a large lake which continued to rise to become the Black Sea, probably the Biblical and other mythological Flood as there would have been constant rain, drowning many villages.
No mention of the excavation of the middens of eastern North American Native villages, which depended on elk and left their bones for generations, then started hunting more deer as well, finally deer bones alone, as the trees moved with changing weather. MesoAmerican civilisations are covered, and one in west South America, mainly because they too irrigated and grew crops.
With humans thriving as they produced food and starving as food ran scarce, moving on, the human population has eaten all the wildlife of the world, which now consists of two percent of the animal life on Earth, compared to 98% being humans and their livestock. Today there is nowhere unclaimed to move to, which is why climate migrants are coming to Europe. Today we have poured so much CO2 and other gases into the air that we are artificially warming the world. In the past millions died every time the climate changed. Today we think we should not let that happen, but nor do we do much to stop unsustainable populations from multiplying. I think we need to make food aid dependent upon accepting contraceptive injections, and plant more trees.
I borrowed this book from the Royal Dublin Society Library. This is an unbiased review.
September 20, 2013
A sweeping history of the post-Ice Age migrations of humans over the last 18,000 years. This is a great book, and it answers so many questions about why people ended up in the pockets of the world in which they did, as well as why and how agriculture developed where it did. The one problem I have with it is that Fagan has this apprehension about what he calls "environmental determinism", i.e. the idea that it could be said that the environment is the reason that certain things happened, say the development of agriculture. He calls this misguided, and a viewpoint that (in hyperbolic terms, I assume) nearly destroyed this type of research. Then he goes on to write at least two books that show how much climate determined exactly these types of things. I think this is probably more representative of his generation (1930s) than a real issue. One more minor problem with his book is his view that there was some sort of worldwide post Ice Age disaster that caused the extinction of large mammals. He goes out of his way to discuss how it could not have been the subsequent warm-weather population explosion of humans and the invention of new technologies that drove the extinctions. This seems to be the same type of thinking that leads to the idea that climate is too large to be seriously affected by humans, and seems increasingly a minority viewpoint.
October 6, 2013
إحم .. هو كتاب معلوماته فخيمة كدة وبيقول كلام زى الفل :D
اللى مش دارس جغرافيا وجيولوجيا هايلاقى درجة من الملل تتزايد مع تقدم قراءته .. إنما اللى دارس هايلاقى الكتاب بالنسبة له إضافة ممتعة وقوية جداً
الفصل الثامن بعنوان "هبات من الصحراء" بيتكلم عن أصول الحضارة الفرعونية والأصل وراء استخدام الفراعنة لرموز "الثور" و"البقرة" فى رسوماتهم .. ده أكتر فصل عجبنى :)
اللى مش دارس جغرافيا وجيولوجيا هايلاقى درجة من الملل تتزايد مع تقدم قراءته .. إنما اللى دارس هايلاقى الكتاب بالنسبة له إضافة ممتعة وقوية جداً
الفصل الثامن بعنوان "هبات من الصحراء" بيتكلم عن أصول الحضارة الفرعونية والأصل وراء استخدام الفراعنة لرموز "الثور" و"البقرة" فى رسوماتهم .. ده أكتر فصل عجبنى :)
September 18, 2020
هذه هي القراءة الثانية للكتاب، وللمرة الثانية لا زلت استمتع بمحتواه. رحلة في تاريخ الحضارة الإناسنية تبدأ منذ نحو خمسة عشرة ألف سنة قبل ميلاد السيد المسيح، وتستمر حتى القرن الثاني عشر، يبحث فيها المؤلف كيف أسهم المناخ في تشكيل حضارة الإنسان، منتقلًا من كهوف فرنسا إلى وادي الرافدين ومصر، ومنها إلى المكسيك، مستكشفًا طريقه مستخدمًا الأدلة الحفرية والأركيولوجية والتراث الشفاهي للشعوب، حتى يرسم هذه الصورة المشوقة عن تاريخ من زاوية أخرى.
July 15, 2020
Fagan adds a new dimension to the failure of civilizations outside value reversals and psychological self-destruction posed by Brooks Adams, Spengler, or de Tocqueville. Data from a variety of sources, not available until recently, correlates with history the impacts of climate on civilization. Fagan opens with a curious personal experience—his small sailboat on treacherous Spanish waters, passed by cargo-laden hulks seemingly oblivious to nature’s furry. This introduction becomes a useful analogy for the “scale of our vulnerability.” As we complicate society and “tame” nature, we also massively increase the calamity of nature’s accumulating response. The Sumerian city of Ur becomes our first tour, and what a tour it is. Fagan hits his stride, crystallizing his point when Sumerians are his centerpiece. Conceived around 6000 BCE as a collection of villages already employing canals for irrigation, the region suffered a monsoon shift driving Sumerians to increase organization through innovation. Hence, invention of the city by 3100 BCE. Volcanic induced climate shift eventually ran the Sumerian ship aground, as similar shifts did for others, not only starving the populous but dissolving faith in their gods, kings, and way of life. But, Fagan writes, “The intricate equation between urban population, readily accessible food supplies and the economic, political and social flexibility sufficient to roll with the climatic punches has been irrevocably altered… If Ur was a small trading ship, industrial civilization is a supertanker.” And supertankers split in half now and then.
The ability to simply return to farming or hunter-gathering is now lost given that so many of us occupy the landscape, competing with everyone else under the same conditions. If some of us once comforted ourselves with notions of shinning up the hunting rifle, returning to nature in our tent during such a calamity, forget it. When societies, stretched to the limit, falter under climate change, stress in the psyche comes to the fore in ways never imagined, even (or especially) in abrasive group-oriented societies like ours. Tribal suspicions lay waiting for such opportunities.
Fagan notes the same human response by cultures separated by thousands of years, different continents, “meaning and value” systems. “In both the Old World and the New,” he writes, “human societies reacted to climate traumas with social and political changes that are startling in their similarities.” Universal human truths, after all. (Take that, postmodernists.)
“But if we’ve become a supertanker among human societies, it’s an oddly inattentive one,” writes Fagan. “Only a tiny fraction of people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, and entertaining each other. Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed, the most powerful among us subscribe to a theory that says storms don’t exist. And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman’s ear that he might consider turning the wheel.” So ends a well written, at times spellbinding account of our past and warning to our present, ignored at our peril.
The ability to simply return to farming or hunter-gathering is now lost given that so many of us occupy the landscape, competing with everyone else under the same conditions. If some of us once comforted ourselves with notions of shinning up the hunting rifle, returning to nature in our tent during such a calamity, forget it. When societies, stretched to the limit, falter under climate change, stress in the psyche comes to the fore in ways never imagined, even (or especially) in abrasive group-oriented societies like ours. Tribal suspicions lay waiting for such opportunities.
Fagan notes the same human response by cultures separated by thousands of years, different continents, “meaning and value” systems. “In both the Old World and the New,” he writes, “human societies reacted to climate traumas with social and political changes that are startling in their similarities.” Universal human truths, after all. (Take that, postmodernists.)
“But if we’ve become a supertanker among human societies, it’s an oddly inattentive one,” writes Fagan. “Only a tiny fraction of people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, and entertaining each other. Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed, the most powerful among us subscribe to a theory that says storms don’t exist. And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman’s ear that he might consider turning the wheel.” So ends a well written, at times spellbinding account of our past and warning to our present, ignored at our peril.
May 6, 2016
We are intrinsically enmeshed with the weather.
This book takes us on a trip through the history of the world through the eyes of everyman. It is an amazing journey. It compels us to live with humans starting with the Cro-Magnons of 18,000 years ago as they emerged from their caves to hunt beasts and gather wild berries. We follow our ancestors through the Ice Age, through climate warming and cooling, through droughts and deluges, as they encountered abundance and starvation, as they moved with the changes, developed houses, villages and cities. This is not an imaginary journey. It is documented with astonishing accuracy from ice core samples taken from Greenland to the Antarctic, pollen samples, artifacts, tree rings, isotopes found in bones and teeth, from every facet on scientific study.
The scope of this book does not lend itself to a quick read. A few pages a night left my mind reeling. But I looked forward to continuing this slow trek through time night after night. It has made me more human. The world has been shaped by the weather. And it will continue to be. How will it affect future generations? I would love to arrange for a visit in 1,000 or 10,000 years to see.
This book takes us on a trip through the history of the world through the eyes of everyman. It is an amazing journey. It compels us to live with humans starting with the Cro-Magnons of 18,000 years ago as they emerged from their caves to hunt beasts and gather wild berries. We follow our ancestors through the Ice Age, through climate warming and cooling, through droughts and deluges, as they encountered abundance and starvation, as they moved with the changes, developed houses, villages and cities. This is not an imaginary journey. It is documented with astonishing accuracy from ice core samples taken from Greenland to the Antarctic, pollen samples, artifacts, tree rings, isotopes found in bones and teeth, from every facet on scientific study.
The scope of this book does not lend itself to a quick read. A few pages a night left my mind reeling. But I looked forward to continuing this slow trek through time night after night. It has made me more human. The world has been shaped by the weather. And it will continue to be. How will it affect future generations? I would love to arrange for a visit in 1,000 or 10,000 years to see.
September 25, 2013
Interesting.
For further review, see: http://susannag.booklikes.com/post/22... .
For further review, see: http://susannag.booklikes.com/post/22... .
January 4, 2020
Perhaps two stars is ungenerous, but that's colored by my initial enthusiasm leaching away as I dragged myself through this book. Fagan states his premise early on, using a marine metaphor: humanity has moved from the nimble sailboat (small groups relying on domestic agriculture supplemented by hunting / gathering) to the fortified supertanker (our industrialized, interconnected world of today). The latter may be more equipped to weather average-sized storms but will (literally) founder when faced with the rolling seas that the sailboat can more easily ride out.
I can't speak to its accuracy from a nautical perspective, but the metaphor lost its power for me as the book examined major climatic shifts over the last 20,000 years. It quickly felt like dull repetition, with civilizations rising and falling, rising and falling. Sometimes they are able to survive extended periods of drought or cold or rain but eventually each succumb. By the end, my overall sense is that societies survive until they don't.
The book moves back and forth in time, mostly focused on Europe and the Americas. There is little to no effort to synthesize, which gave me the sense of -- in the wise words of Homer Simpson -- "Just a bunch of stuff that happened." There are certainly interesting interludes: the evolution of the Black Sea; the migration of humans in response to warming temperatures; and the punishing droughts and periodic coolings that have occurred as part of natural cycles.
I do like the message that humans have done a poor job of considering how anomalous a time we live in. In recent decades, we have expanded to what may be close to the carrying capacity of the Earth without considering the resiliency needed to withstand fundamental changes to our climate.
To me, this heightens the threat of anthropogenic global warming, something Fagan appears relatively unconcerned (unmotivated?) about, at least given the little space he devotes to the topic. Fagen's view is best explained by his larger theme; that modern civilization is threatened by inevitable climate disruptions of all types ("Ultimately, the cause of the warming is only a side debate.").
But I consider this a missed opportunity to highlight the folly of assuming that we can continue to add billions of tons of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere every year without consequence. Regardless of the natural rhythms that might strain our capacity to adapt, we are knowingly putting ourselves at risk by loading the dice in favor of a climate that is more hostile to contemporary civilization.
My dissatisfaction may be more that this was not the book I was looking for.
I can't speak to its accuracy from a nautical perspective, but the metaphor lost its power for me as the book examined major climatic shifts over the last 20,000 years. It quickly felt like dull repetition, with civilizations rising and falling, rising and falling. Sometimes they are able to survive extended periods of drought or cold or rain but eventually each succumb. By the end, my overall sense is that societies survive until they don't.
The book moves back and forth in time, mostly focused on Europe and the Americas. There is little to no effort to synthesize, which gave me the sense of -- in the wise words of Homer Simpson -- "Just a bunch of stuff that happened." There are certainly interesting interludes: the evolution of the Black Sea; the migration of humans in response to warming temperatures; and the punishing droughts and periodic coolings that have occurred as part of natural cycles.
I do like the message that humans have done a poor job of considering how anomalous a time we live in. In recent decades, we have expanded to what may be close to the carrying capacity of the Earth without considering the resiliency needed to withstand fundamental changes to our climate.
To me, this heightens the threat of anthropogenic global warming, something Fagan appears relatively unconcerned (unmotivated?) about, at least given the little space he devotes to the topic. Fagen's view is best explained by his larger theme; that modern civilization is threatened by inevitable climate disruptions of all types ("Ultimately, the cause of the warming is only a side debate.").
But I consider this a missed opportunity to highlight the folly of assuming that we can continue to add billions of tons of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere every year without consequence. Regardless of the natural rhythms that might strain our capacity to adapt, we are knowingly putting ourselves at risk by loading the dice in favor of a climate that is more hostile to contemporary civilization.
My dissatisfaction may be more that this was not the book I was looking for.
May 28, 2017
يبين الكتاب اثر التغييرات المناخية على العوالم القديمة , عصور الجليد الممتدة وما تلاها من الاحترار الفجائي , تأقلم المجتمعات و نزوحها وما يمكن ان نتعلمه من كل ما سبق مع تنامى الاحتباس الحراري في العصور الحديثة.. إذا ثنى القارئ على هذا الكتاب بكتاب نيل ديجراس تايسون "البدايات" خصوصا الفصل المتعلق بالاحتباس الحراري لكوكب الزهرة سيكمل تصوره عن الايام القادمة لكوكب الارض .
September 29, 2022
Un libro divulgativo, entretenido y generalmente muy ameno. También es un poco desordenado en su exposición y creo que comete errores cuando da cifras precisas sobre aspectos del pasado que no podemos conocer de manera tan exacta. En cualquier caso, sirve para hacerse una idea acerca de cómo afectó el Periodo Cálido Medieval a muchas sociedades a lo largo del mundo; empezando por Europa (que se vio beneficiada), continua por otros espacios como las estepas, el sahel, norte, centro y suramerica, el Pacífico o Asia. Además, traza notables paralelismos con el presente, pues la situación que entonces se vivió y la que estamos viviendo, tienen notables similitudes.
Con todo ello, quizá no sea un 8, pero tampoco es un 6.
Con todo ello, quizá no sea un 8, pero tampoco es un 6.
September 10, 2016
Mark Twain supposedly once said "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it", I guess as a commentary on how helpless human beings are over the vast power of nature. Well, these days humanity is certainly doing something about the weather in the form of dumping tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, but it's under-appreciated how vulnerable we still are to unusual weather events, how dependent on complex climate patterns modern civilization is, and also how fortunate we are to have come of age as a species in an unusually long spell of (relatively) moderate climate across the whole planet. Indeed, without particular confluences of abrupt climate disequilibria, we'd probably still be hanging around Olduvai Gorge.
According to Fagan, primitive peoples were doing just fine in their native ecosystems for tens of millennia, wandering around their veldts and steppes, chasing the seasons and the prey animals, until a series of climate shifts allowed them to expand beyond their traditional homelands and colonize the whole planet. He documents a whole series of climate "pumps" - in the first stage a group of humans has settled a particular area and is hemmed in by resources or inhospitable conditions. Then a shift allows that group to expand a little bit farther, either to take advantage of new opportunities or under pressure from another group trying to compete for its homeland. Then the climate shifts again, and since the group can't stay where it is and it can't go back to where it was, it's forced out into new lands. After a few cycles of expand, explore, consolidate, and expand again, groups of hunter-gatherers had been pushed to every corner of the globe, sometimes carrying old technology with them but often being forced to innovate and adapt to new environments and food sources along the way. At some point in recent history an unusually long period of relative calm began - and I say "relative" only because Fagan recounts numerous examples of the often catastrophic effects that even single-year events like late rains or exceptionally cold winters had on medieval and classical civilization - and humanity was able to build the foundations of intensive agriculture and far-flung trade networks that all modern societies have inherited. There's a consistent theme of the fragility of civilization, as groups coalesce into tribes, then into states, then into empires, only to disintegrate after rainfall patterns shifted.
It concurs with a good deal of Jared Diamond's Collapse, albeit from strictly climate-based perspective rather than resource-based. I always enjoy these broad high-level popular science history books because they give you new ways to look at the world. For example, in not too long the American Southwest, which for many many years was a nearly waterless desert, will have to make tough choices about what kind of lifestyle they can afford in the face of what is guaranteed to be an astronomical increase in the price of water. Up until now, the US has been rich enough (and wet enough) to have all the golf courses and hilariously non-native crops that it wanted, wherever it wanted, but very slight shifts in climate could render the lifestyles of tens of millions of people not just unsustainable, but unsupportable period. The abandoned dwellings in Chaco Canyon make for excellent tourist attractions, but it doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to wonder if Phoenix could end up the same way, and what the implications would be for the rest of the country. Closer to home, the landscape of my own native Texas Hill Country has changed greatly from its settlement by cotton farmers to its current infestation by cedar trees, the only thing hardy enough to grow on the edge of the great western desert (for more on the heartbreak this caused would-be farmers, see the beginning of Robert Caro's superb Path to Power). If rain fell consistently just a few meridians to the west, then the economy of all of North America would be very different, and it's cool to speculate on that sort of thing.
Fagan doesn't really go into much of the what-ifs, but I was a little mystified by his tendency to end every chapter in the same way - after pages and pages of sober, well-sourced historical discussion, he would launch into a few closing paragraphs of fervid speculation about the spiritual beliefs of the Clovis people or Siberian nomads or whoever. It's not a huge deal, but the contrast between the detached and scientific sections talking about the contents of paleolithic waste dumps and the feverishly prolix sections about the meanings of cave paintings was very noticeable. However, his overall metaphor of civilization as a huge ship blundering in treacherous seas was well-chosen, and ably conveys the risk and uncertainty involved in building our cities and our lives in places so easily affected by changes in climate.
According to Fagan, primitive peoples were doing just fine in their native ecosystems for tens of millennia, wandering around their veldts and steppes, chasing the seasons and the prey animals, until a series of climate shifts allowed them to expand beyond their traditional homelands and colonize the whole planet. He documents a whole series of climate "pumps" - in the first stage a group of humans has settled a particular area and is hemmed in by resources or inhospitable conditions. Then a shift allows that group to expand a little bit farther, either to take advantage of new opportunities or under pressure from another group trying to compete for its homeland. Then the climate shifts again, and since the group can't stay where it is and it can't go back to where it was, it's forced out into new lands. After a few cycles of expand, explore, consolidate, and expand again, groups of hunter-gatherers had been pushed to every corner of the globe, sometimes carrying old technology with them but often being forced to innovate and adapt to new environments and food sources along the way. At some point in recent history an unusually long period of relative calm began - and I say "relative" only because Fagan recounts numerous examples of the often catastrophic effects that even single-year events like late rains or exceptionally cold winters had on medieval and classical civilization - and humanity was able to build the foundations of intensive agriculture and far-flung trade networks that all modern societies have inherited. There's a consistent theme of the fragility of civilization, as groups coalesce into tribes, then into states, then into empires, only to disintegrate after rainfall patterns shifted.
It concurs with a good deal of Jared Diamond's Collapse, albeit from strictly climate-based perspective rather than resource-based. I always enjoy these broad high-level popular science history books because they give you new ways to look at the world. For example, in not too long the American Southwest, which for many many years was a nearly waterless desert, will have to make tough choices about what kind of lifestyle they can afford in the face of what is guaranteed to be an astronomical increase in the price of water. Up until now, the US has been rich enough (and wet enough) to have all the golf courses and hilariously non-native crops that it wanted, wherever it wanted, but very slight shifts in climate could render the lifestyles of tens of millions of people not just unsustainable, but unsupportable period. The abandoned dwellings in Chaco Canyon make for excellent tourist attractions, but it doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to wonder if Phoenix could end up the same way, and what the implications would be for the rest of the country. Closer to home, the landscape of my own native Texas Hill Country has changed greatly from its settlement by cotton farmers to its current infestation by cedar trees, the only thing hardy enough to grow on the edge of the great western desert (for more on the heartbreak this caused would-be farmers, see the beginning of Robert Caro's superb Path to Power). If rain fell consistently just a few meridians to the west, then the economy of all of North America would be very different, and it's cool to speculate on that sort of thing.
Fagan doesn't really go into much of the what-ifs, but I was a little mystified by his tendency to end every chapter in the same way - after pages and pages of sober, well-sourced historical discussion, he would launch into a few closing paragraphs of fervid speculation about the spiritual beliefs of the Clovis people or Siberian nomads or whoever. It's not a huge deal, but the contrast between the detached and scientific sections talking about the contents of paleolithic waste dumps and the feverishly prolix sections about the meanings of cave paintings was very noticeable. However, his overall metaphor of civilization as a huge ship blundering in treacherous seas was well-chosen, and ably conveys the risk and uncertainty involved in building our cities and our lives in places so easily affected by changes in climate.
March 31, 2019
Mokslo populiarinimo knyga apie klimato pokyčius ir jų įtaką žmonių istorijos raidai. Knyga skirta tiems, kurie domisi žmonių gyvenimo sąlygomis nuo 15 000 m. pr. Kr., taip pat senovės Egipto ir Mesopotamijos civilizacijomis. Šiek tiek dėmesio skiriama ir pirmiesiems Amerikų gyventojams. Iš pradžių skaityti nėra labai įdomu, nes pateikiami daugiau ar mažiau žinomi faktai apie priešistorės žmonių gyvenimą ir pramitimo būdus, tačiau įpusėjus knygą pasidaro įdomiau, juolab, kad gyvenant Europoje, paprastai mažiau domimasi ir žinoma apie Amerikų gyventojus, kad ir tuos pačius majus.
Neabejoju, kad kiekvienas, perskaitęs šią knygą, sužinos ką nors nauja. Kai kuriose vietose autorius pasistengė pateikti ir įdomesnių mokslinių faktų. Geriausia yra tai, kad autorius neapsiriboja vien Europa, tačiau skiria dėmesio archeologiniams atradimams tiek Azijoje, tiek ir Amerikose. Autorius parodo, kokią didelę įtaką medžiojimui, gyvulininkystei, žemdirbystei ir apskritai miestų atsiradimui turėjo nereguliarūs klimato atšilimo ar atšalimo laikotarpiai.
Skaitant knygą nuolatos neapleido mintis, kad autorius mėgins neigti dabar egzistuojantį klimato atšilimą, neva sakydamas, kad tie atšilimai visada egzistavo, tačiau taip neatsitiko. Džiugu, kad autorius nebėgo nuo dabartinio klimato atšilimo klausimo ir pabrėžė, kuo jis yra kitoks ir kaip prie jo prisideda žmonės. Todėl rekomenduoju visiems perskaityti šią knygą.
Apie majus:
P.248."Klasikiniu majų civilizacijos laikotarpiu, 200–800 m., matyti nauji prisitaikymo prie iššūkius keliančios žemumų aplinkos būdai. Daugelis bendruomenių dabar savo gyvenvietes statė ant kalvų, o karjerai, iš kur buvo imamos
statybinės medžiagos piramidėms, šventykloms ir kitiems pastatams, tapo didelėmis vandens saugyklomis, apsuptomis dirbtinių kalvų ir aikščių, iš kurių
kritulių vanduo buvo nukreipiamas į jas. Majų architektai be galo išradingai
projektavo kanalus vandeniui iš pakilesnėje vietoje esančios centrinės vandens
saugyklų sistemos nuvesti į mažesnius telkinius ir į drėkinimo įrenginius.6
Tos sudėtingos vandens tvarkymo sistemos buvo kuriamos daug šimtmečių dėl būtinybės kaupti vandenį šalyje, neturinčioje sezoninių upių potvynių
ar net didelių upių – tokių, kurios aprūpino vandeniu egiptiečius ar šumerus.
Majai sukūrė tai, ką archeologas Vernonas Skabaras (Vernon Scarborough) pavadino mažosiomis vandenskyromis kritulių trūkumui kompensuoti.
Tačiau tokios sistemos turi didelių apribojimų. Jos gali aptarnauti tik apibrėžtą teritoriją. Krituliai pripildydavo vandens saugyklas ir mažesnius baseinus,
tik jų kiekis kasmet smarkiai svyravo, todėl griežtai valdyti iš jų tiekiamo vandens kiekį taip, kaip Mesopotamijos drėkinimo sistemoje, buvo neįmanoma.
Vandens tvarkymui ir laukų drėkinimui žemumose reikėjo tinkamos topografijos, labai lankstaus darbo jėgos valdymo, taip pat – daug eksperimentuoti, taikant bandymų ir klaidų metodą.
Šimtus metų majų žemės ūkis pamažu kūrė labai sudėtingą infrastruktūrą,
kurios produktyvumas, laikui bėgant, didėjo. Viskas buvo daroma pamažu ir gerai
apgalvojus socialiniame ir politiniame kontekste, prisitaikiusiame prie gležnos tropinės aplinkos realijų. Majus lydėjo sėkmė, nes jie daug šimtmečių mokėsi veikti
tokioje aplinkoje, atsižvelgdami į aplinkos apribojimus, kuriuos išbandė savo kailiu. Jie žiūrėjo, kad kaimai būtų išsklaidyti, ir sukūrė tarpusavio priklausomybės
lygį, atspindintį netolygų teritorinį dirvų ir maisto išteklių pasiskirstymą".
Neabejoju, kad kiekvienas, perskaitęs šią knygą, sužinos ką nors nauja. Kai kuriose vietose autorius pasistengė pateikti ir įdomesnių mokslinių faktų. Geriausia yra tai, kad autorius neapsiriboja vien Europa, tačiau skiria dėmesio archeologiniams atradimams tiek Azijoje, tiek ir Amerikose. Autorius parodo, kokią didelę įtaką medžiojimui, gyvulininkystei, žemdirbystei ir apskritai miestų atsiradimui turėjo nereguliarūs klimato atšilimo ar atšalimo laikotarpiai.
Skaitant knygą nuolatos neapleido mintis, kad autorius mėgins neigti dabar egzistuojantį klimato atšilimą, neva sakydamas, kad tie atšilimai visada egzistavo, tačiau taip neatsitiko. Džiugu, kad autorius nebėgo nuo dabartinio klimato atšilimo klausimo ir pabrėžė, kuo jis yra kitoks ir kaip prie jo prisideda žmonės. Todėl rekomenduoju visiems perskaityti šią knygą.
Apie majus:
P.248."Klasikiniu majų civilizacijos laikotarpiu, 200–800 m., matyti nauji prisitaikymo prie iššūkius keliančios žemumų aplinkos būdai. Daugelis bendruomenių dabar savo gyvenvietes statė ant kalvų, o karjerai, iš kur buvo imamos
statybinės medžiagos piramidėms, šventykloms ir kitiems pastatams, tapo didelėmis vandens saugyklomis, apsuptomis dirbtinių kalvų ir aikščių, iš kurių
kritulių vanduo buvo nukreipiamas į jas. Majų architektai be galo išradingai
projektavo kanalus vandeniui iš pakilesnėje vietoje esančios centrinės vandens
saugyklų sistemos nuvesti į mažesnius telkinius ir į drėkinimo įrenginius.6
Tos sudėtingos vandens tvarkymo sistemos buvo kuriamos daug šimtmečių dėl būtinybės kaupti vandenį šalyje, neturinčioje sezoninių upių potvynių
ar net didelių upių – tokių, kurios aprūpino vandeniu egiptiečius ar šumerus.
Majai sukūrė tai, ką archeologas Vernonas Skabaras (Vernon Scarborough) pavadino mažosiomis vandenskyromis kritulių trūkumui kompensuoti.
Tačiau tokios sistemos turi didelių apribojimų. Jos gali aptarnauti tik apibrėžtą teritoriją. Krituliai pripildydavo vandens saugyklas ir mažesnius baseinus,
tik jų kiekis kasmet smarkiai svyravo, todėl griežtai valdyti iš jų tiekiamo vandens kiekį taip, kaip Mesopotamijos drėkinimo sistemoje, buvo neįmanoma.
Vandens tvarkymui ir laukų drėkinimui žemumose reikėjo tinkamos topografijos, labai lankstaus darbo jėgos valdymo, taip pat – daug eksperimentuoti, taikant bandymų ir klaidų metodą.
Šimtus metų majų žemės ūkis pamažu kūrė labai sudėtingą infrastruktūrą,
kurios produktyvumas, laikui bėgant, didėjo. Viskas buvo daroma pamažu ir gerai
apgalvojus socialiniame ir politiniame kontekste, prisitaikiusiame prie gležnos tropinės aplinkos realijų. Majus lydėjo sėkmė, nes jie daug šimtmečių mokėsi veikti
tokioje aplinkoje, atsižvelgdami į aplinkos apribojimus, kuriuos išbandė savo kailiu. Jie žiūrėjo, kad kaimai būtų išsklaidyti, ir sukūrė tarpusavio priklausomybės
lygį, atspindintį netolygų teritorinį dirvų ir maisto išteklių pasiskirstymą".
April 4, 2008
Fagan is a science writer who proposes that civilization was 'changed' by climate. He attempts to link climactic variations to: the ebb and flow of human settlement of North, the rise of civilizations dependant on farming, the extinction of North American megafauna, etc. His engine of change, civilization, evolution (both physical and cultural) is climate. He firmly rejects the Pleistocene over-kill hypothesis and links the "Younger Dryas" to the reversal or cessation of the Atlantic conveyer belt. He is a fervent believer in anthropogenic warming through greenhouse gas emissions. From the Vostok cores and other sources, he says civilization arose in a warmer, "long summer". He cannot predict the course of the future cycles of climate on earth now and in the present, but can discern their possible outcomes and is disturbed that the reality of anthropogenic climate change may cause the reversal of the North Atlantic conveyer circulation resulting in the freezing of Europe, etc.
He also concludes based on possibly analogous reasoning from present and recent past societies that the CroMagnons had religion, shamans, etc. He also details the fate and career of many societies that arose because of climate change and fell because of climate change. Anasazi, Mayan, etc.
He also concludes based on possibly analogous reasoning from present and recent past societies that the CroMagnons had religion, shamans, etc. He also details the fate and career of many societies that arose because of climate change and fell because of climate change. Anasazi, Mayan, etc.
September 6, 2016
Where he possibly can he sticks to examples of climate change affecting man in the Americas and Europe - where his target audience lives. The middle-east is there because he cant get away without it. But I would like to have read something of China, south-east Asia, India, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa. That's a lot of the world, and a lot of civilization that he has not even mentioned.
I haven't read any of his other books but I feel I will recognise pieces if I do, as I felt that this book was a rehash of some of his other books plus bits he had not found a place for. I have a couple of his books on my reading list, so I will find out in due course.
I think recent studies on Neanderthals (eg some modern humans have traces of Neanderthal DNA) would throw out his interpretation for their demise but it is an area where there is a lot of debate and insufficient evidence, as yet.
I got fed up with his giving an interpretation of, say, Cro-Magnon society as if it were fact: "Shamans defined human existence in chant and song with oral traditions and familiar tales". Possibly, but lets hear the evidence for it. There are plenty of other places where supposition is aired as fat.
I haven't read any of his other books but I feel I will recognise pieces if I do, as I felt that this book was a rehash of some of his other books plus bits he had not found a place for. I have a couple of his books on my reading list, so I will find out in due course.
I think recent studies on Neanderthals (eg some modern humans have traces of Neanderthal DNA) would throw out his interpretation for their demise but it is an area where there is a lot of debate and insufficient evidence, as yet.
I got fed up with his giving an interpretation of, say, Cro-Magnon society as if it were fact: "Shamans defined human existence in chant and song with oral traditions and familiar tales". Possibly, but lets hear the evidence for it. There are plenty of other places where supposition is aired as fat.
May 22, 2013
Disappointing.
I really enjoyed The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (I gave it 4 stars). I was not thrilled with The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (I gave it 2 stars) and I have to say that I do not care much for The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization either.
In fact, to be short and sweet let me suffice it to say that if you follow this link: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/...
and see my review about The Great Warming and add in an extended discussion about mankind in the Ice Age you will pretty much have the substance of The Long Summer. The two books could have easily have been made into one slightly larger book.
Click here for my review of The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 : http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...
I really enjoyed The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (I gave it 4 stars). I was not thrilled with The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (I gave it 2 stars) and I have to say that I do not care much for The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization either.
In fact, to be short and sweet let me suffice it to say that if you follow this link: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/...
and see my review about The Great Warming and add in an extended discussion about mankind in the Ice Age you will pretty much have the substance of The Long Summer. The two books could have easily have been made into one slightly larger book.
Click here for my review of The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 : http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...
September 20, 2022
I cannot recommend this book to a scholar or a novice. It was painfully dull but most importantly disjointed. The span of time presented was impressive but the depth to which climate, cultures, and related topics were investigated or revealed was shallow at best. I jumped into The Long Summer wholeheartedly, ready to expand my knowledge and make connections to current issues of climate change. I struggled to finish, waiting for the book to get better but essentially it read like a bunch of reports put together in a book. The information engaged me but the writing did not hold my attention for any sustainable length of time. I hope The Little Ice Age is better.
January 1, 2017
Fascinating look at how global weather patterns shape the rise, fall, and adaptation of civilizations. I wish their had been more of a formal comparison of new world vs. old world adaptations to drought, rather than simply a brief nod to a few Native American civilizations at the end of the book. Also, there is no mention of East Asian civilizations (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Indonesian), which I found very odd.
November 3, 2023
The Long Summer is a fascinating book. It was written in 2004, but it seems even more relevant now as the devastating effects of climate change become undeniable. In the first chapter, Fagan writes about the efforts of the Army Corps of engineers to control the course of the Mississippi river outside of New Orleans. He wrote: "The battle to control the river never ceases, for a breach upstream is always possible and the awesome power of flooding water can break out anywhere." Of course, Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The Long Summer describes how climate fluctuations had huge impacts on human history. Starting with the end of the last ice age, temperature variations allowed humans to move into Europe and Asia, and then humans retreated again when temperatures cooled again and the ice sheets expanded. I was surprised to read how often the Atlantic ocean currents were disrupted, and what a major effect this had on European conditions - and how the warming ocean temperatures once again threaten the flow of the Great Conveyor which carries warm water to the shores of Europe.
Fagan says that one of the greatest inventions in history was the needle - because it allowed our ancestor to sew form fitting clothing so that humans could venture into cold environments - and ultimately spread throughout Europe and Asia, and subsequently cross the Bering Land bridge and conquer the Americas.
Fagan describes a huge lake of melted glacier water called Lake Agassiz that once existed in central Canada - it was much bigger than Lake Superior. All of this water was suddenly freed in an unimaginable torrent when an dam of glacial ice collapsed, abruptly releasing trillions of gallons of fresh water that carved the St. Lawrence Seaway in the violent rush to the sea.
Euxine Lake was fresh water lake below sea level with many early civilizations clustered around its shores. A land barrier eroded, allowing the waters of the Mediterranean Sea to pour into the basin in another devastating flood - the waters rapidly rose until a new sea was formed at sea level - this was the origin of the Black Sea. It is possible that this incredible flood gave rise to the stories of the great flood that appear in so many cultures, including the Biblical story of Noah's ark.
It was impressive to read how scientists learn all of these facts. They study ice cores, drill into lake bottoms and examine fossil records. They can check pollen counts, tree rings, and the air inside bubbles trapped in ice. One study looked at the rocks on the ocean floor - those rocks could only have been deposited in those locations if they floated there in melting icebergs, so the scientists can deduce when icebergs were present in which eras.
Fagan states the he doesn't think that the extinction of so much of the Earth's megafauna was caused by human hunting; he argues that rapid climate change caused so many species to disappear. But if climate fluctuations caused the big animals to vanish, then why didn't smaller animal species also go extinct? Why did megafauna that was isolated on islands away from humans survive for much longer? Yes, one mastodon would provide enough meat to feed a tribe for an entire year, but humans frequently kill for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with collecting food.
On page 24 of the paperback edition is a graph that shows how remarkably stable the Earth's average temperature has been for the last 8000 years. Yes, there have been droughts which led to the fall of many civilizations (such as the Mayans), but for most of recorded history, humans have enjoy an ideal climate that has allowed us to prosper. On page 25 is a graph that shows the temperature variation over the last 420,000 years - it shows how the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere closely tracked the ice ages (there were 4 ice ages over that 420K span). At no point on that graph did the CO2 concentration exceed 320 parts per million. Yet today CO2 makes up 421 ppm - the implications of which are terrifying if you stop to think about it, especially after reading an entire book about how previous civilizations collapsed in the face of climate stresses.
I thought the last paragraph Fagan wrote in the book (remember, it was written in 2004) was especially haunting, so I am including it in its entirety here:
But if we've become a supertanker among human societies, it's an oddly inattentive one. Only a tiny fraction of the people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, entertaining each other, or studying the sky or the hydrodynamics of the hull. Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed the most powerful among them subscribe to a theory that says storms don't exist, or if they do, their effects are entirely benign, and the steepening swells and fleeing albatrosses can only be taken as a sign of divine favor. Few of those in command believe the gathering clouds have any relation to their fate or are concerned that there are lifeboats for only one in ten passengers. And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman's ear that he might consider turning the wheel.
The Long Summer describes how climate fluctuations had huge impacts on human history. Starting with the end of the last ice age, temperature variations allowed humans to move into Europe and Asia, and then humans retreated again when temperatures cooled again and the ice sheets expanded. I was surprised to read how often the Atlantic ocean currents were disrupted, and what a major effect this had on European conditions - and how the warming ocean temperatures once again threaten the flow of the Great Conveyor which carries warm water to the shores of Europe.
Fagan says that one of the greatest inventions in history was the needle - because it allowed our ancestor to sew form fitting clothing so that humans could venture into cold environments - and ultimately spread throughout Europe and Asia, and subsequently cross the Bering Land bridge and conquer the Americas.
Fagan describes a huge lake of melted glacier water called Lake Agassiz that once existed in central Canada - it was much bigger than Lake Superior. All of this water was suddenly freed in an unimaginable torrent when an dam of glacial ice collapsed, abruptly releasing trillions of gallons of fresh water that carved the St. Lawrence Seaway in the violent rush to the sea.
Euxine Lake was fresh water lake below sea level with many early civilizations clustered around its shores. A land barrier eroded, allowing the waters of the Mediterranean Sea to pour into the basin in another devastating flood - the waters rapidly rose until a new sea was formed at sea level - this was the origin of the Black Sea. It is possible that this incredible flood gave rise to the stories of the great flood that appear in so many cultures, including the Biblical story of Noah's ark.
It was impressive to read how scientists learn all of these facts. They study ice cores, drill into lake bottoms and examine fossil records. They can check pollen counts, tree rings, and the air inside bubbles trapped in ice. One study looked at the rocks on the ocean floor - those rocks could only have been deposited in those locations if they floated there in melting icebergs, so the scientists can deduce when icebergs were present in which eras.
Fagan states the he doesn't think that the extinction of so much of the Earth's megafauna was caused by human hunting; he argues that rapid climate change caused so many species to disappear. But if climate fluctuations caused the big animals to vanish, then why didn't smaller animal species also go extinct? Why did megafauna that was isolated on islands away from humans survive for much longer? Yes, one mastodon would provide enough meat to feed a tribe for an entire year, but humans frequently kill for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with collecting food.
On page 24 of the paperback edition is a graph that shows how remarkably stable the Earth's average temperature has been for the last 8000 years. Yes, there have been droughts which led to the fall of many civilizations (such as the Mayans), but for most of recorded history, humans have enjoy an ideal climate that has allowed us to prosper. On page 25 is a graph that shows the temperature variation over the last 420,000 years - it shows how the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere closely tracked the ice ages (there were 4 ice ages over that 420K span). At no point on that graph did the CO2 concentration exceed 320 parts per million. Yet today CO2 makes up 421 ppm - the implications of which are terrifying if you stop to think about it, especially after reading an entire book about how previous civilizations collapsed in the face of climate stresses.
I thought the last paragraph Fagan wrote in the book (remember, it was written in 2004) was especially haunting, so I am including it in its entirety here:
But if we've become a supertanker among human societies, it's an oddly inattentive one. Only a tiny fraction of the people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, entertaining each other, or studying the sky or the hydrodynamics of the hull. Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed the most powerful among them subscribe to a theory that says storms don't exist, or if they do, their effects are entirely benign, and the steepening swells and fleeing albatrosses can only be taken as a sign of divine favor. Few of those in command believe the gathering clouds have any relation to their fate or are concerned that there are lifeboats for only one in ten passengers. And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman's ear that he might consider turning the wheel.
April 28, 2015
The theme of this book is the dance between human population growth and changes in the environment in which those peoples lived (and live now).
August 20, 2018
This is a book that forces us to take the long view. Though it contains brief asides about the possible consequences of human-caused climate change, it is mostly concerned with the changing climates of the past 15,000 years or so.
Fagan makes a strong case that climactic fluctuations played an important, and sometimes even decisive, role in the rise and fall of early human societies. The book covers changes in Europe, the Middle East, and America. His thesis, if we extrapolate it to the present, may give readers a bit of a chill: that societies tend to become more complex over time, collecting in larger urban centers creating supply chains can simultaneously produce more food for area inhabitants, but also are vulnerable to sustained climatic change. In essence, cities grow, and more and more people are no longer subsistence farmers. They diversify into other trades and a cultural and economic web forms which gives us all kinds of good things, but also relies heavily on area land to continue producing food at expected rates. A year or two of bad harvests can be tolerated, but sustained drought, flooding, or other dramatic change over decades or centuries cannot.
By implication he suggests we may be at or near another such crossroads in our own time. In ancient societies, inhabitants could move to new lands and abandon their cities. This option has become less and less tenable over time, as new land is not simply sitting around for the taking the way it may have been in 10,000 B.C.
In one truly stunning passage, Fagan describes the way the Black Sea formed in a matter of months after the collapse of an enormous ice sheet in North America forced water levels to rise around the globe. It boggles my mind to imagine this. He claims the water would have rise at a rate of 15 inches every day, submerging all kinds of infrastructure and destroying human settlements and lives.
My middling star rating doesn't have much to do with the content of the Long Summer. It's mostly because the writing did not engage me and staying awake was a major challenge. This is one of those books that I think would have made a better long article. The same points could have been made in a 50 page essay and lay-readers such as myself would be just as well-off as they are having read all 250 pages of this book.
That quibble aside, this book has deepened my understanding of what climate change has done to humans in the past and what it might do again in the future. It's a good addition to my climate-related reading list.
Fagan makes a strong case that climactic fluctuations played an important, and sometimes even decisive, role in the rise and fall of early human societies. The book covers changes in Europe, the Middle East, and America. His thesis, if we extrapolate it to the present, may give readers a bit of a chill: that societies tend to become more complex over time, collecting in larger urban centers creating supply chains can simultaneously produce more food for area inhabitants, but also are vulnerable to sustained climatic change. In essence, cities grow, and more and more people are no longer subsistence farmers. They diversify into other trades and a cultural and economic web forms which gives us all kinds of good things, but also relies heavily on area land to continue producing food at expected rates. A year or two of bad harvests can be tolerated, but sustained drought, flooding, or other dramatic change over decades or centuries cannot.
By implication he suggests we may be at or near another such crossroads in our own time. In ancient societies, inhabitants could move to new lands and abandon their cities. This option has become less and less tenable over time, as new land is not simply sitting around for the taking the way it may have been in 10,000 B.C.
In one truly stunning passage, Fagan describes the way the Black Sea formed in a matter of months after the collapse of an enormous ice sheet in North America forced water levels to rise around the globe. It boggles my mind to imagine this. He claims the water would have rise at a rate of 15 inches every day, submerging all kinds of infrastructure and destroying human settlements and lives.
My middling star rating doesn't have much to do with the content of the Long Summer. It's mostly because the writing did not engage me and staying awake was a major challenge. This is one of those books that I think would have made a better long article. The same points could have been made in a 50 page essay and lay-readers such as myself would be just as well-off as they are having read all 250 pages of this book.
That quibble aside, this book has deepened my understanding of what climate change has done to humans in the past and what it might do again in the future. It's a good addition to my climate-related reading list.
January 7, 2017
_The Long Summer_ by Brian Fagan is in essence a follow up of his excellent earlier work, _The Little Ice Age_, a book that explored the effect of a particular climatic episode on European civilization between the years 1300 and 1850. Fagan expanded his focus greatly in _The Long Summer_ as in this work he analyzed the effects of various climatic events since 18,000 B.C. on the course of Stone Age life, early farming societies, and the evolution of civilizations in Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Americas, covering climatically-influenced human history from the settlement of the Americas to the origins of the Sumerians to the conquest of Gaul by Rome (which was fascinating) through the end of the Mayan and Tiwanaku civilizations (in Central and South America respectively). As in _The Little Ice Age_, Fagan dismissed both those who discounted the role climatic change had played in transforming human societies and those who believed in environmental determinism (the notion that climate change was the primary cause of major developments in human civilization).
Fagan provided many examples of climatic change affecting human history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change - and resulting alteration in the ecology of the region - lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally more dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes included increased mobility - and the end of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer attached to certain areas - and the development of the bow and arrow, much more effective in dense forest against solitary, skittish prey.
While Europeans adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans became dependent upon a relatively moist area of oak and pistachio forests that extended from modern Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not developing agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but rather relied on wild plants, they nevertheless developed some of the early signs of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and other tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they collected each year, supplemented by wild grass seeds and wild gazelles.
While the development of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass stands was a response to climatic and ecological changes brought on by the end of the Ice Age, their eventual end was also largely brought upon by the onset of a series of intense droughts thanks to a remarkable and seemingly distant event around 11,000 B.C.; the draining of the immense Lake Agassiz, a huge meltwater lake that lapped the retreating Laurentide ice sheet for 1,100 km in modern day Canada and the U.S. The lake rose so much that it eventually burst its banks and flooded into what is now Lake Superior and then onto to the Labrador Sea. So much Agassiz meltwater floated atop the dense, salty Gulf Stream that for ten centuries that conveyor of warm, moist air to Europe ceased, among other things plunging southwestern Asia into a thousand year drought. This drought eliminated the groves that the Kebarans depended upon, ending their prehistoric society, though not before the first experiments with cultivating wild grasses. Eventually villages arose that existed primarily dependent and then completely dependent upon cereal agriculture, on grain crops planted and harvested by the people themselves. In such places as Abu Hureyra in modern Syria full-fledged farming arose by 9500 B.C. as a response to drought, to the end of the oak-pistachio belt and the decline of game.
Just as drought lead to early experiments with pre-agricultural communities and then to the actual cultivation of grains, it may have also lead to the domestication of wild goats and sheep in southwestern Asia and of cattle in what would become the Sahara Desert. The arid conditions for instance in southwestern Asia between 11,000 and 9500 B.C. lead to a concentration of game and of humans around the increasingly few permanent water sources, an event that would allow hunters to intimately know individual herds, even individual animals, allowing for these ancient humans to learn how to control the few key members of herds, to selectively cull undesirable members to change the characteristics of that herd's offspring, and how to eventually capture and pen some or all of the herd for later consumption.
It was amazing to me how different the climate and terrain of ancient man truly was. Those who discount the effects of climatic change upon human history should consider how different the world of 6200 BC was. In this year - the time of the famed flat-roofed settlement of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey - farmers lived on the shores of the vast, brackish Euxine Lake to the north of the Anatolian plateau (what would become the Black Sea) and the Laurentide glacier was still retreating in northern Canada. In this year (more or less) began what has been called the Mini Ice Age as vast amounts of Laurentide meltwater suppressed the Gulf Stream, plunged Europe into colder and drier conditions, produced a profound drought in the Mediterranean, and caused ocean waters to rise so that Britain was finally severed from the continent.
Also quite interesting were the several prehistoric societies Fagan touched upon, such as the Kebarans, the `Ubaid people of 5800 B.C. southern Mesopotamia (they predate the Sumerians), the Linearbandkeramik communities of 5600 B.C. Europe, and the early fifth millennium B.C. Badarians of the Nile Valley, groups I was completely unfamiliar with.
Fagan provided many examples of climatic change affecting human history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change - and resulting alteration in the ecology of the region - lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally more dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes included increased mobility - and the end of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer attached to certain areas - and the development of the bow and arrow, much more effective in dense forest against solitary, skittish prey.
While Europeans adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans became dependent upon a relatively moist area of oak and pistachio forests that extended from modern Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not developing agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but rather relied on wild plants, they nevertheless developed some of the early signs of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and other tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they collected each year, supplemented by wild grass seeds and wild gazelles.
While the development of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass stands was a response to climatic and ecological changes brought on by the end of the Ice Age, their eventual end was also largely brought upon by the onset of a series of intense droughts thanks to a remarkable and seemingly distant event around 11,000 B.C.; the draining of the immense Lake Agassiz, a huge meltwater lake that lapped the retreating Laurentide ice sheet for 1,100 km in modern day Canada and the U.S. The lake rose so much that it eventually burst its banks and flooded into what is now Lake Superior and then onto to the Labrador Sea. So much Agassiz meltwater floated atop the dense, salty Gulf Stream that for ten centuries that conveyor of warm, moist air to Europe ceased, among other things plunging southwestern Asia into a thousand year drought. This drought eliminated the groves that the Kebarans depended upon, ending their prehistoric society, though not before the first experiments with cultivating wild grasses. Eventually villages arose that existed primarily dependent and then completely dependent upon cereal agriculture, on grain crops planted and harvested by the people themselves. In such places as Abu Hureyra in modern Syria full-fledged farming arose by 9500 B.C. as a response to drought, to the end of the oak-pistachio belt and the decline of game.
Just as drought lead to early experiments with pre-agricultural communities and then to the actual cultivation of grains, it may have also lead to the domestication of wild goats and sheep in southwestern Asia and of cattle in what would become the Sahara Desert. The arid conditions for instance in southwestern Asia between 11,000 and 9500 B.C. lead to a concentration of game and of humans around the increasingly few permanent water sources, an event that would allow hunters to intimately know individual herds, even individual animals, allowing for these ancient humans to learn how to control the few key members of herds, to selectively cull undesirable members to change the characteristics of that herd's offspring, and how to eventually capture and pen some or all of the herd for later consumption.
It was amazing to me how different the climate and terrain of ancient man truly was. Those who discount the effects of climatic change upon human history should consider how different the world of 6200 BC was. In this year - the time of the famed flat-roofed settlement of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey - farmers lived on the shores of the vast, brackish Euxine Lake to the north of the Anatolian plateau (what would become the Black Sea) and the Laurentide glacier was still retreating in northern Canada. In this year (more or less) began what has been called the Mini Ice Age as vast amounts of Laurentide meltwater suppressed the Gulf Stream, plunged Europe into colder and drier conditions, produced a profound drought in the Mediterranean, and caused ocean waters to rise so that Britain was finally severed from the continent.
Also quite interesting were the several prehistoric societies Fagan touched upon, such as the Kebarans, the `Ubaid people of 5800 B.C. southern Mesopotamia (they predate the Sumerians), the Linearbandkeramik communities of 5600 B.C. Europe, and the early fifth millennium B.C. Badarians of the Nile Valley, groups I was completely unfamiliar with.
October 8, 2017
Is climate change real? Of course, it is. The earth is a dynamic place. The sun is a dynamic star. The universe itself is ever changing.
I am writing this as a review of three books I have reread this year. Two are by Brian Fagan, and one by Steven Mithen. They cover ice ages, warming periods, and their effects on human development and the rise of civilizations.
Climate change is a natural phenomenon. What isn’t natural, is how our behavior is a new element in the equation of climate change. We have the capacity to make rapid changes that the environment, the creatures that share this world with us, and even ourselves, can’t adapt to fast enough.
These books give us a look at the effects of climate change at a slower, preindustrial pace. They can serve as a benchmark of the dark side of what our achievements have brought. They look at climate change from a historical and archaeological perspective. They tell the story of climate through the eyes of our own history and how these changes affected us.
While these books cover a period of about 20,000 years, our greatest influence as a growing factor in our earth’s climate is less than 200 years.
I am writing this as a review of three books I have reread this year. Two are by Brian Fagan, and one by Steven Mithen. They cover ice ages, warming periods, and their effects on human development and the rise of civilizations.
Climate change is a natural phenomenon. What isn’t natural, is how our behavior is a new element in the equation of climate change. We have the capacity to make rapid changes that the environment, the creatures that share this world with us, and even ourselves, can’t adapt to fast enough.
These books give us a look at the effects of climate change at a slower, preindustrial pace. They can serve as a benchmark of the dark side of what our achievements have brought. They look at climate change from a historical and archaeological perspective. They tell the story of climate through the eyes of our own history and how these changes affected us.
While these books cover a period of about 20,000 years, our greatest influence as a growing factor in our earth’s climate is less than 200 years.
August 20, 2018
The Long Summer provides a fascinating and informative summary of the interplay between human history and periods of major climatic change during the last 18,000 years. Brian Fagan masterfully combines archeological, historical, geological, biological, chemical, and astronomical research findings – explaining methods and findings in accessible detail and building a picture of an interconnected, changing globe and human adaptations to those changes throughout recent (pre)history. We read of glacial melt, volcanic eruptions, disruptions of the Gulf Stream/Atlantic conveyor, changes in orientation of the earth’s axis and solar radiation, and more – all well-documented incidents associated with climatic changes and shifts lasting not just years, but centuries – drought, floods, shifts in temperature zones – all forcing human movement and social-cultural adaptation.
The Long Summer ends any illusion that our climate is relatively unchanging and provides deep background for our ongoing deliberations about the impact of currently measured and projected climatic changes on our global society.
The Long Summer ends any illusion that our climate is relatively unchanging and provides deep background for our ongoing deliberations about the impact of currently measured and projected climatic changes on our global society.
April 15, 2025
I was drawn to this book by an interest in ecological dynamics on human society. However, the first half of the book was primarily focused on evolutionary theories concerning mankind’s move from tree based living to walking erect on the planet. It was laborious and highly speculative in my opinion.
At last, my patience was rewarded as the narrative took an intriguing turn. Fagan began tracing the effects of droughts, erratic temperatures and ecological unpredictability on past civilizations. His analysis leaned heavily on geological data to demonstrate the ways in which weather patterns precipitated the demise of the Hittite, Mayan and other powerful empires. This section was stimulating and too brief for me. Having constructed a historic precedent for nature’s central role in human society, I was hoping for a more extensive application. It certainly is merited by recent studies on planetary ecological systems.
At last, my patience was rewarded as the narrative took an intriguing turn. Fagan began tracing the effects of droughts, erratic temperatures and ecological unpredictability on past civilizations. His analysis leaned heavily on geological data to demonstrate the ways in which weather patterns precipitated the demise of the Hittite, Mayan and other powerful empires. This section was stimulating and too brief for me. Having constructed a historic precedent for nature’s central role in human society, I was hoping for a more extensive application. It certainly is merited by recent studies on planetary ecological systems.
May 2, 2020
A better title would have been “The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Western Civilization” as the vast majority of chapters within real with western civilization. While the book does contain 2 chapters on Indigenous people’s of the present day southwest and western US, central America and South America, they seem tacked on. Brief mentions of the Asiatic steppe and Saharan peoples are mentioned sparsely. Most surprisingly, the whole of Asia is repeatedly reduced to “Southeast Asia has monsoons,” rather than looking at the impact of drought and famine on the cycles of Chinese dynasties which seems like it would be an ideal fit for the thesis of this book. The chapters on western civilizations changes based on climate, however, are well explained with more than adequate examples of the climates impact on those civilizations, otherwise I would have rated it less.
May 14, 2022
In {The Long Summer}Anthropologist-Archaeologist Brian Fagan investigates climactic shifts and the impact on human history...from how the Ice Age made way for the warmer period we now know to the fascinating history of the melting glaciers, changing course of rivers, higher sea levels and the resulting migration.
Fagan does not have all the answers, and in charting the pattern of human adaption to climate change he builds a chronological tale that puts the link between earth sciences and civilisation at the heart of the question.
As an archaeology, anthropology and history buff I thoroughly enjoyed this accessible window to view the last 15,000 years in the life of our planet.
It is a cautionary tale highlighting our vulnerability in an ever changing climate.
Fagan does not have all the answers, and in charting the pattern of human adaption to climate change he builds a chronological tale that puts the link between earth sciences and civilisation at the heart of the question.
As an archaeology, anthropology and history buff I thoroughly enjoyed this accessible window to view the last 15,000 years in the life of our planet.
It is a cautionary tale highlighting our vulnerability in an ever changing climate.
August 26, 2018
I have intended to fill in some gaps in my understanding of the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Fagan does a great job of piecing together the good and bad consequences of cyclical climate patterns. He pays some lip service to the current man made global warming but the body of the work seems to provide evidence to the contrary. Excellent read!
August 23, 2021
Didn't quite read through the entire thing but i read most of it. Interesting book that sometimes gets bogged down in unnecessary thoroughness but all in all a fairly readable and interesting account of the development of civilizations around the world in parallel with and in response to changes in climate. Definitely insight to be pulled from here with respect to the current climate crisis.
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