This is at http://phys.org/print264333845.html … evidence of the end of Old Kingdom drought as recorded in the Ipuwer Papyrus (first intermediate period) has been found in pollen and charcoal preserved in buried sediments from the Nile delta. Several major drought episodes have been found, corresponding not just to low Nile levels but to precise setbacks in the civilisation of Egypt. The paper is published in the journal Geology (July, 2012) and the sediment core goes back to around 5000BC. They also catalogued the presence of charcoal fragments – mainly because they think landscape fires coincide with droughts, a standard global warming kind of thinking. Landscape fires can of course have origins, not simply in dry vegetation caught alight by lightning, but by the kind of cosmic connection central to the Clube and Napier theory of active Tauirid meteor streams at precisely those kind of dates thrown up by the study. They also appear to gel very nicely into low growth tree ring events and ice core anomalies. The study found a distinct link between a decline in the amount of wetland plant pollen and charcoal deposits. This correspondence occurred on four notable occasions between 3000 and 6000 years ago (4000-1000BC) one of which was the abrupt drought in the First Intermediate Period (but here dated to 2200BC which is somewhat too early for the drought recorded on Egyptian monuments but would fit more snugly with the catastrophic demise of Akkad and diverse other parts of the world). Two of the other events occurred i) 3500-3000BC, and ii) around 1000BC (without supplying the actual boundaries but clearly linked in the authors minds with the drought in Babylonia and Assyria during the so called Dark Ages following the end of the LB age site destructions). However, if the 1000BC date has a C14 base and then this may indicate the end of LB had occurred shortly before – rather than 150 to 200 years prior to 1000BC.
The paper has the title 'Nile delta response to Holocene climate variability' for those who wish to follow it up rather than just accept the abstract and news report.