June 27th 2021

Fingerwag

    For years in my feverish scribblings Easter Island loomed up as a cautionary tale. Now it's the turn of Malta.

    "A culture arose in the Maltese archipelago nearly 6,000 years ago and at its height probably numbered several thousand people—far denser than the people of mainland Europe could manage at the time. The island people constructed elaborate sacred sites, such as the famous Ġgantija temple complex, and their buildings are among the earliest free-standing buildings known. But, after 1,500 years, they were gone.
    "From what they’ve uncovered, a scientific team thinks that these people understood the importance of soil management to fend off starvation. Within a hundred years of their arrival on the tiny group of islands they had felled most of the trees, exposing the ground to drastic erosion. To survive, they reared dairy animals rather than prioritizing meat—killing off newborn livestock before they had a chance to graze. They mixed livestock manure back into the soil and may even have made back-breaking journeys carting soil washed into the valleys back uphill to refresh the upland fields. The evidence for this lies in strange, parallel ruts in the ground that may be cart tracks, as well as signs from the skeletons that soft tissue had sometimes been worn completely away by hard, repetitive activity. Oddly, though, says Caroline Malone of Queens University Belfast, they ate almost no fish!
    "Despite the society’s strength and success, as centuries passed the soil erosion and climate conditions worsened, as evidenced by the different types of pollen in the soil, the diminishing number of tree remains and the human bones wracked with evidence of dietary deficiencies. In the final centuries, between 2600 BC and 2400 BC, half of those dying were children. Other factors likely contributed, said Malone, adult skulls from this time are greatly varied, their DNA indicating the arrival of immigrants from as far as the Eurasian Steppes and sub-Saharan Africa, possibly causing population pressure and new diseases.
    "The decisive blow may have been an unknown catastrophe that occurred around 2350 BC, a period during which, according to tree ring analysis, the whole region suffered a catastrophic climate event, possibly a dust cloud caused by a volcanic eruption."
          Loose extrapolations from an article published first by Nautilus - writer, Aisling Irwin