No end to Ice Age

Michael B said:
Unlikely unless the currents in the Pacific were different. The Polynesians were still migrating to new islands in AD 1300, but at no time did they get closer to the Americas than Hawaii and Easter Island, both of which were colonised circum AD 500.

Uncertain.
Some say that they did reach South America but were so few in number that they were largely assimilated into the already existing natives.
 
Ah! The Ice Ages!

I presume that what we are discussing involves a two mile thick chunk of Ice still covers central North America and much of Europe, that sealevels are greatly depressed, that there is still a land bridge at the bering straights and that the North Seas is above water in enough places that walking to Britain is very easy?

There might still be civilizations. What we know as "civilization" arose in Mesopotamia, the Nile and Indus Valleys, and in China, and those places weren't glaciated. Not only that, they had far more water and rainfall than is found at present, so an emerging civilization and agriculture MIGHT in fact have been easier.

So far as I know, our knowledge of the human condition as found from 12,000 to 6000 years ago is very limited. Whole civilizations of whom we have never found a trace COULD have existed. If Civilization first emerged under conditions that included ample rainfall, high fertility of the soil, and a lush climate, why then there you have it---The Garden of Eden, which unfortunately dried up and became buried under sand dunes when the rainfall ceased and weather patterns changed, after the Ice receded.

If the Ice had not melted and retreated to the poles, all of the arid, desert places such as the Sahara, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Northern Mexico/SouthWestern USA would be wet, semi-tropical, verdant places.
 

monkey

Banned
SkyEmperor said:
Neanderthals-human relations provide a very interesting conundrum. How would they handle eachother?

Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago at the latest. 20,000 years before the begining of the curent interglacial period, and this POD.

America will be settled by people crossing the ice pack living the the eskimo lifestyle. There is evidence that America was first reached by people from europe and siberia ariving this way, and that the ice free coridor never existed. This is given as the reason why native americans do not have slanty asian eyes.

Agriculture will take longer to develope as there will not be the presure of shrinking hunting ranges. Few forager chose to farm, they must be forced into it by circumstance. When population pressure forces the choice between invading another tribe and intensifying food production, war is usually the prefered option.

Plus the Ice core records seem to show that the glacial period are very climatically unstable. Without the last ten thousand years of extrodinarily stable climate, incipitent farmers may frequently find themselves planting the wrong plants at the wrong time of year. Pastorialism however might still take off.

Stephen Wordsworth
 
monkey said:
Agriculture will take longer to develope as there will not be the presure of shrinking hunting ranges. Few forager chose to farm, they must be forced into it by circumstance. When population pressure forces the choice between invading another tribe and intensifying food production, war is usually the prefered option.
Yes and no. There is a third alternative to population pressure, population control in the form of infanticide, contraception and spacing out births.

For interest: hunter-gartherers pup every four years so the older child is walking on its own all the time. In contrast, early farmers pupped every two years because the tribe wasn't on the move, children could be left to crawl around in the dirt.
 
Shope said:
If the last ice age hadn't ended, the Mediturranean Sea would be dry land surrounding a relativeley small freshwater lake, or sink (fed by the Nile).

No.The Strait of Gibraltar is too deep to have dried in the Ice Age. But likely the Bal el Mandeb would dry and the Red Sea would be an empy hot dry salt-floored sink.
 
JLCook said:
I presume that what we are discussing involves a two mile thick chunk of Ice still covers central North America and much of Europe, that sealevels are greatly depressed, that there is still a land bridge at the bering straights and that the North Seas is above water in enough places that walking to Britain is very easy?

There might still be civilizations. What we know as "civilization" arose in Mesopotamia, the Nile and Indus Valleys, and in China, and those places weren't glaciated. Not only that, they had far more water and rainfall than is found at present, so an emerging civilization and agriculture MIGHT in fact have been easier.

So far as I know, our knowledge of the human condition as found from 12,000 to 6000 years ago is very limited. Whole civilizations of whom we have never found a trace COULD have existed. If Civilization first emerged under conditions that included ample rainfall, high fertility of the soil, and a lush climate, why then there you have it---The Garden of Eden, which unfortunately dried up and became buried under sand dunes when the rainfall ceased and weather patterns changed, after the Ice receded.

If the Ice had not melted and retreated to the poles, all of the arid, desert places such as the Sahara, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Northern Mexico/SouthWestern USA would be wet, semi-tropical, verdant places.
Well said. I thought there might be some unglaciated places in the Fertile Crescent for example. And you make a good point about more water causing civilization to develop faster.
 

monkey

Banned
Most of the information I have read on the glacial periods says the opisite. During the glacial period the colder climate led to less water evaporation on smaller seas leading to a dryer global climate. The Sahara and other deserts were larger and there is alot of dust in the glacial layers from the ice age in the ice cores. The time when the deserts like the sahara were smaller than they are today was at the begining of this interglacial period up till a couple of thousand years BC. The cave paintings from the sahara show a pastorial lifestyle with catle and chariots.

Stephen Wordsworth
 
johnp said:
Well said. I thought there might be some unglaciated places in the Fertile Crescent for example. And you make a good point about more water causing civilization to develop faster.
Paradoxically the first ever farmers were not from a wet area, but the dry hills of the Near East. However, you don't have to live a dry area to independently invent farming (as opposed to copying a neighbour); New Guinea and the Amazon Basin are both areas where farming was independently invented and are far wetter than the near East, the Nile and China.

What is more important than climate is what plants are available for domestication and this is where the Near East was particulary favoured.
 
Some present theories, in fact, point to mankind having a much easier time of it in the last maximally glaciated period. According to these, it was the drying out of the pleasant grassland plains on the Sahara as the European sheets retreated which drove the easy living nomads who hunted there east into the also shrinking Nile valley; where they then had to learn irrigation, and its necessarily attendant civilized values, or die.

I agree entirely. When the last ice age ended humans became as much as a foot shorter in some places. It became a case of 'Farm or Die'.
 
Humankind has had the benefit of an unusually stable climate for the last 10 000 years. If we want civilization to develop, we would have to postulate another such equilibrium, or else the agricultural societies will probably be less effective than the nomads.

I suspect we might see agricultural empires develop in todays Sahara, given a stable climate.
 
I agree entirely. When the last ice age ended humans became as much as a foot shorter in some places. It became a case of 'Farm or Die'.

This is inaccurate. It was a case of "Farm or control the population" and only once the farming start did humans' height start reducing. That was because of the less healthy diet.
 
Humans were well adapted to the glacial period. It was the end of the ice age that caused a crisis throughout much of the world, of the usual ecosystems changing. Even if some of the changes would be thought of as beneficial to our modern notion of carrying capacity to the land, to the people of that era, they were not.

The immediate responses were diversification of food sources, including more intensive plant gathering. That plant gathering gradually became agriculture. There was also the rise of animal herding and domestication. Following these changes there were concentrations of population and civilization.
 
This is inaccurate. It was a case of "Farm or control the population" and only once the farming start did humans' height start reducing. That was because of the less healthy diet.

Instead of a varied diet with a mixture of hunting and gathering, with usual seasonal bounties and shortages, there was a general limited list of crops, and entire years that were bad, instead of seasons.
 

Tellus

Banned
I'm very interested by these figures on how large an impact the transition to agriculture really had on our height! I had no idea it had caused such shrinkage. 1 foot?!

Nowadays, we humans have been gaining in height since the last few hundred years... I suppose modern diets are substantially more diverse than pre-industrial age ones.

Does this mean that in a few hundred years, we will grow shorter once again, once a few generations of pepsi and frozen pizzas takes their toll? :D
 
How do you know it hasn't ended

The Pleistocene period consisted of 4 major glacial advances and several minor ones. There were three interglacial periods during which tempratures were higher than at present. The last glacial phase ended around 10,000 BC less than half the period covered by the major interglacials. It is probable we are living in another interglacial.

Global warming might actually accelerate the next phase by melting Anartic ice reflecting sunlight back

Had the ice sheets not retreated civilisation would have started further South it wasn't like the late Pre-Cambrian ice age that covered most of the globe
 
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