In October last year, Mike Baillie and I published an article in the conference proceedings “2200 BC – A climatic breakdown as a cause for the collapse of the Old World?”. The six month embargo on it appearing digitally was lifted today.

The article title is “Why we shouldn’t ignore the mid-24th century BC when discussing the 2200-200 BC climate anomaly.”

The focus on the conference was on the archaeological, geophysical, and palaecology/palaeoclimatology of the so called 4.2 kya event. This period, beginning around 2200 BC and lasting at least two centuries, marked a sudden shift in climatic patterns, and may have resulted in social and geopolitical upheaval in ancient civilisations.

In our paper we show that the event may have begun abruptly in 2206 BC, and lasted for three hundred years, as recorded in Irish bog oak. We also find that it may also be linked to a previous dramatic environmental downturn beginning in 2354 BC. Looking at “dated myths”, one could conclude that perhaps earth was subjected to one or more cosmic impacts in the 2350’s BC. Furthermore, we observe a possible 37-year periodicity in a series of tree-ring chronologies from across Europe, beginning in the 24th century, and extending to the 19th century, and which links the years 2354 BC to 2206 BC. If the two are indeed linked, and if the periodicity is real, then it suggests that the 4.2 kya event may have had a cosmic component, perhaps a period of extended bombardment such as that suggested by the Coherent Catastrophism hypothesis of Napier, Clube, Asher, Bailey and Steel.

The full paper can be downloaded here Mike Baillie and Jonny McAneney “Why we shouldn’t ignore the mid-24th century BC when discussing the 2200-2000 BC climate anomaly.” In: “2200 BC – A climatic breakdown as a cause for the collapse of the Old World?” Meller et al. (Eds) 7th Archaeological Conference of Central Germany October 23-26, 2014 in Halle (Saale) (2015).”

Jonny

The path to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns. - David M Raup