Ancient landscapes point to dramatic climate change
Scientists believe Chinese civilisation could have been founded by climate refugees after the collapse of an Inner Mongolian culture over 4,000 years ago.
LONDON, 26 February, 2015 − Chinese and US scientists have uncovered prehistoric evidence of mass migration triggered by climate change.
Something occurred 4,200 years ago – a collapse of the monsoon system, the sapping of the groundwater, the sudden drainage of a lake – that brought a Neolithic culture to an end and left nothing but sandy landscapes in China’s Inner Mongolia region.
Archaeological evidence has revealed the jade carvings that once marked the Hongshan culture, along with evidence of hunting, fishing and even commercial traffic with Mongolian shepherds. And then the artefacts stop.
There is a 600-year period marked by no evidence of human settlement at all. Where there had once been streams, lakes grassland and forest, and a flourishing new Stone Age culture, only shifting sand dunes remained.
Recent origin
Xiaoping Yang, professor in the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and research colleagues from China, New Mexico, Hawaii and Texas report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they used a new laboratory technique to show that the northern Chinese deserts were not – as many had thought – millions of years old.
Instead, they are of very recent origin, and the researchers found evidence of dramatic change during human settlement.
In addition, the exploration of artefacts in the region – and the discovery, among other things, of a jade object that might be a dragon − now suggests that Chinese culture and identity may have its origins in the far north, rather than in the Yellow River basin, which has been the archaeologists’ working hypothesis until now.
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