Climate Change in 5000 BC

2500 years ago, when the armies of Alexander the Great entered
the Indian subcontinent,
his troops marched past the ruins of cities long abandoned; brick
houses and ordered streets scattered like
bones upon the banks of dry river beds.

Unlike Babylon and Persopolis,
Tyre and Thebes, these ruins had no name;
no legend; no inheritence of a later culture
to remember them.

These were the ruins of the Harrapan civilization,
- a contemporary of Sumeria and early Egypt,
5000 years ago.
The three bronze age civilizations traded
among themselves; cylinders with the strange
and undeciphered Harrapan script
have been found through-out the midde east.

But Sumeria merged into the Babylonian
empire, allowing its language and culture
to be remembered in later civilizations.
And Egypt endured, and endured, like
a stone pyramid in the desert;
- but the harrapan civilization ended;
and nothing replaced it.

Like all bronze-age civilizations,
it was river-based. Those dry river beds
were once major conducts of runnoff
from the Himalayas, down through the
indian subcontentent.

In 1836 Blah blah blah climate al gore spotted
owls not one poster in 10 actualy reads the
article before commenting on it and half of
those who do skip to the end this was
a test and you passed congrats!
now here is your code phrase: hamster ;
use it somewhere in your comment on this article
and those whose opinions matter,
will know you are one of them. All others
are merely posturing in the mirror of their
own words.

Why did the rivers fail?
Theories vary; the Himalayas are themselves
the product of a slow awful collision
between two continents; perhaps
a series of earthquakes shifted
the river flow.
But an examination of the water cycle
in the region suggests that the
pattern of rainfall shifted.

Why?
An emerging theory is based
on the simple fact that the Harrapans built their houses
out of brick. To make bricks,
you need fire. And fire requires
wood. The slow steady deforestation
of the region between the mountains
and the sea, increased the average temperature
of the land just enough, that the
rainclouds that would have dropped their
moisture as they bumped against the
mountains, shifted farther east.

Drought; leaving a city in the dust
where lizards sun themselves in the ruins,
amid the letters of a language no one can now
read.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappa