Pueblo Indian Society Overcomes Disaster

For John, BLUF:  There was history in North American before the coming of the British.  Here is an example of a society that coped well for several centuries.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

One American Culture Actually Benefited From 'The Worst Year in Human History'

From Science Alert, by Reporter Mike McRae, 3 DECEMBER 2021.

Here is the lede plus two:

As far as years go, you could do a lot better than 536 CE. By some historians' standards, it may have well been 'the worst year to be alive in human history'. Depending on where a person lived around the globe, those cold, bleak times kept on truly sucking for many years to come.

Now, it seems it might not have been the worst thing, at least for the Ancestral Puebloan communities who occupied the southwestern US. In fact, the darkness of this brief, global ice age might have heralded a bright new day for their culture.

A study conducted by a team of archeologists and anthropologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Colorado State University in the US has uncovered signs that the population spread across the Four Corners region not only recovered from a catastrophic climate shift in the mid-6th century – in some ways they came back stronger than ever.

To understand the climate issue, consider that reports were of a sun performing like the moon, due to an atmosphere obscuring the sun due to volcanoes:

Today, it appears this sun-shielding fog had its origins in a series of volcanic eruptions across the Americas, which spewed enough ash into the atmosphere to turn summer into winter across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Just five years later, a good chunk of the Roman population would fall beneath a plague like no other. Oh, and another colossal volcanic event, this time in El Salvador, churned out even more ash to top it all off.

Life in North America wasn't much better. Measurements of tree rings from northern Arizona reveal a drop in temperature and precipitation that lasted for decades.

Yet archaeological records show that in spite of these challenging times, the Ancient Puebloans would go on to develop a rich, complex culture that would thrive for centuries.

So, are we as a society ready to meet the new social challenges that would be posed by a rapid climate change or some other environmental or economic change?  Not some gradual climate change, but rather a rapid onset, one that included major challenges in food production and in other activities, including new diseases and a gloomy atmosphere?

I am not sure the Biden Administration and the "Green New Deal would be what we would need in such a crisis.  I suspect we would benefit most from decentralized empowerment.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff