Climate change may be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2000 B.C.
WSU archaeologist Jade D’Alpoim Guedes and an international team of researchers found that cooling global temperatures at the end of the Holocene Climatic Optimum, a 4,000 year period of warm weather, would have made it impossible for ancient people on the Tibetan Plateau to cultivate millet, their primary food source.
Guedes’ team’s research recently was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her results provide the first convincing explanation for why the area’s original inhabitants either left or so abruptly changed their lifestyles.