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The Mayan climate extremes and megadroughts of the Medieval era

Bernard DUPONT: El Castillo Pyramid, western side – Tulum Maya site QR Feb 2020.jpg

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

By Jo Nova

13 year megadrought during Medieval Warm Period may have finished off the Maya

A slightly spooky new paper shows annual rainfall patterns from a thousand years ago on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. It’s so detailed, they list every drought by year, including 13 unbroken years of drought from 929 to 942AD. It’s a bit like someone unearthed the Maya Bureau of Meteorology records from a thousand years ago (except it’s better, because it’s a rock with no politics).

This is one of the highest-resolution tropical stalagmite records ever published. Each year the stalagmite grew by as much as a millimeter, allowing for a year by year analysis — or indeed 12 datapoints within each year.

During this era of perfect CO2, for some reason that no climate model can explain, the poor sods in Maya suffered through extreme swings from wet to dry, stacked back to back. The climate was chaotic. Droughts were followed by floods. It’s uncannily like “climate extremes” we are told man-made emissions are going to bring.

It is sobering […]

August 20th, 2025 | Tags: , , , | Category: Anthropology, Global Warming, Holocene | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Two million years of climate change made us what we are

Bradshaw Art, Kimberley, Australia. This distinctive style of painting disappeared 7,000 years ago. | Photo TimJN1

Two million years of climate change has made us human — in a ying meets yang contradiction, while climate change destroyed cultures and groups, without it, we would not be who we are. The brutal forces of Nature tested our ancestors with droughts, storms, floods and tidal surges, but if the climate had stayed the same, would we have had Bach, Leonardo, and Newton?

At the end of the day, we have a civilization that allows millions of people to pursue happiness without fear that they will die of dysentery, be murdered by marauding barbarians, or lose their children to slave traders.

We are the lucky bastards at the end of a long line of poor sods who struggled and suffered to stay one step ahead of the reaper.

Here are two stories of studies that suggest dramatic effects of climate change on long lost peoples. The second, below, may finally explain the disappearance of the mysterious well developed aboriginal artform known as the “Bradshaw” style.

Rapid changes occurred 2 million years ago

Some swings occurred so fast they happened in “hundreds of […]

January 3rd, 2013 | Tags: , | Category: Anthropology, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Rewriting the dawn of civilization

If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.

Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged in a circle. Around 11,600 years ago hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.

There are plenty of mysteries on this hill. Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings of towers. The people apparently, unthinkably really, were nomadic, as far as we know, they had no wheels, and no beasts of burden. True hunter gatherers, whose first heavy building project was not a home to fend off the elements, but a religious sacred site.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised, after all, we know the pyramids, the largest and oldest surviving buildings didn’t house people or grain either — the only humans they keep warm were dead ones. In a sense, the theme repeats. It takes extraordinary expertise and effort to move tons of […]

January 2nd, 2012 | Tags: , | Category: Anthropology | Print This Post Print This Post | |