Megalithic shipping and trade routes

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Re: Megalithic shipping and trade routes

Postby Boreades » 12:34 pm

The medieval historian Michael McCormick must have a marvelously melodramatic manner.
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

Should he be working for the BBC?
Anyways, what happened?
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

So they say. But where's the evidence?
... the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

https://www.science.org/content/article ... r-be-alive
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Re: Megalithic shipping and trade routes

Postby Boreades » 12:40 pm

Perhaps Iceland is brewing up another big one for us?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68255375
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Re: Megalithic shipping and trade routes

Postby Mick Harper » 12:59 pm

This is all part of a wider academic scandal I deal with in Revisionist Historiography. There are all these disparate disciplines trying like mad to be 'relevant', get on the telly, get the bums on their seats. The more scientific ones have no idea how lax are the standards of evidence used by the unscientific ones, and the unscientific ones don't have the confidence to challenge the scientific ones. They should because while, say, ice core technology is quite well developed, it isn't used to identify -- or at any rate has never shown -- this kind of catastrophic phenomena.

No doubt it is too radical to claim the year 536 AD didn't even exist (as I believe) but it is fair to demand evidence of such profound calamities having the claimed effects in periods where we have good historical records. We know for instance that the Black Death had almost no effect in the sense that by c 1400 everything was pretty much back to normal. We know what volcanic eruptions do and while a veritable Nuclear Winter might be the result in the most extreme case it is the height of special pleading to believe something like it happened in the sixth century.

Though of course it is all meat and drink to a world that is constantly on the lookout for them coming towards them from the future.
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