At https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6385185/Climate-change-l… … we have a post sent in by Gary. The same story is at https://popular-archaeology.com/article/climate-change-likely-caused-mig… … but with a bit less hype (although it is the authors who are actually stressing the climate change and comparing it to the modern day). Strangely, they seem to think that modern migration from Africa and South America is due to climate change rather than economics. Do they live in a parallel universe. It seems the new editor of the Daily Mail may do so as he is pushing certain agendas opposite to his readership. Best of luck with that. It is more or less certain that climate change played a major role in all civilisations 4000 years ago – not just the Indus. It is what caused the climate change they should be addressing, rather than the fact the world cooled for a couple of centuries and droughts and famine struck. That is all old hat – and so are the tectonic factors that swept across the Aegean, Anatolia, Iran and the Indus – a veitable storm of earthquakes. This study focuses solely on climate change – and that appears to be the main reason why it was published (one more piece of doom mongering to add to an endless list of almost useless waffle). The Daily Mail appears to revel in it – journalists quickly moving in sync with their new editor. What has been found by field evidence is that when the river shifted its course and a large part of the region dried up (probably as a result of tectonic activity) people migrated – variously but including the Himalayan footfhills (which makes sense as they have snow and glaciers and trickles of water from the snout). Later, even these people had to move – presumably as the cooling came to an end and other more hospitable places were available. The Indus river had changed its course so they could not go back to their former habitations so they must have migrated south into the Punjab or set up home on a new river channel of the Indus.
There is another climate scare story at https://phys.org/print461487977.html … where we are told that for the first time in 500 years it has rained in a part of the Atacama desert – and this is a disaster as microbial life adapted to the ultra dry conditions were wiped out by a flood of water. In other words it was a heavy dollop of rain dropped by the clouds and this is thought not to have occurred since the 1500s. Basically, that means it has occurred in the past and microbial life will dust itself down and reproduce itself as the dry weather once again digs into the Atacama. I am assuming the 500 years is guesswork – as they don't really know if it has rained or not over such a long period, as people do not live in the harshest zone of the desert. This is typical doom mongering and presumably this was part and parcel of the press release.
The research was published in Science Reports which says 85% of microbial life was wiped out. The research it seems was all part of the Mars mission to find life on the red planet as the desert is in some ways akin to the surface of Mars. Even the dowsing in water is apparently connected as the authors compare what has occurred in the Atacama with what is thought to have occurred on Mars in the past – occasional dowsings in water. They even add that life on Mars is absent, perhaps because of such dowsings. This appears to be a premature analogy as they have no idea if the microbial life in the Atacama will remain absent or make a comeback.