Studying ancient climate change and human societies is rapidly becoming an academic bandwagon. Over the past few years, archaeologists, and historians, have discovered paleoclimatology with a vengeance, so much so that we’re in danger of going back to the old days of climatic determinism.

Back in the early twentieth century, the American geographer Ellsworth Huntington led a series of expeditions to Central Asia, which convinced him that climate change, and especially drought, was a primary cause of such major developments in the past such as the beginnings of agriculture. In many ways, Huntington was the last of the Victorian geographers, who were profoundly interested in the ways in which living organisms responded to their environments. Huntington’s simplistic doctrines have long been discredited, so much so that both archaeologists and historians shied away from climate change for generations. 

Now climate change is fashionable again, largely because of the ongoing revolution in climatology, which has brought us cores, deep sea borings, and tree-rings that, thanks to European oaks, go back as far as about 10,000 years ago. Who would have imagined that a dating method, which provided the first accurate chronology for pueblo beams in the American Southwest, would allow us to date Dutch old masters, authenticate Stradivarius violins, and chronicle rainfall fluctuations down to the season over more than a thousand years?

The new fascination with ancient climate change ties in with a long, and on-going, search for explanations that goes back far earlier than Huntington. Why did humans take up agriculture and move into cities? How, why, and when did people settle in the Americas? The new, much more fine-grained data from tree-rings and ice cores has brought climate change to the fore front once again, as along-neglected factor in human history. From there, it’s a short step to specious arguments that are oddly reminiscent of Ellsworth Huntington’s extravaganzas, or even the relatively simple drought and oasis theories put forward by the European archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe in the 1930s that had humans, animals, and potentially domesticable plants gathered in oases at a time of drought.

Beware of simplistic explanations! Yes, climate change was a powerful factor in suchdevelopments as early agriculture, but many other things were also involved.Think of a pebble cast into a mirrorlike pond. With a plop, the pebble sinks to the bottom. Concentric circles radiate outward from the point of impact, gradually subsiding as they reach the banks. It’s these ripples, economic, political, and social, that are just as powerful as a prolonged drought or amajor El Niño cycle.

But it’s so easy to be seduced by the power of a drought or a series of major Nile floods. Fortunately, compared to Ellsworth Huntington, we know a great deal more abut ancient societies and the ways in which they adapted to external pressures of all kinds. And it was our humanity, our interactions with one another that tempered the effects of climate change.