Episode 16: Megadrought in Mesopotamia

Created, narrated, and produced by Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University, The Climate Chronicles reveals how climate change shaped humanity’s past, and explores what history can tell us about the future of global warming. With clear, dramatic storytelling, each episode brings history to life with exciting storytelling and cutting-edge science.

In the fifth and final episode of our third season, Into the Holocene, Professor Degroot explores the most frightening concept in climate science and archaeology: collapse. First, he explains how the Bronze Age transformed the agricultural communities of the Levant, and contributed to the advent of new systems of domination that culminated in the world's first empire. He traces how new ways of growing and moving food made this empire both more vulnerable and more resilient in the face of climate change than the communities that had prevailed for the previous 300,000 years of human history. Then, he surveys the evidence for a remarkable, decades- or even centuries-long drought that swept across the tropics around 4,200 years ago. Did this 4.2ka BP event bring about the collapse of history's first empire? If so, what does that tell us about our future? And how important was agriculture, anyway, in reshaping our species - not to mention the world? This episode explores all of these questions, and more.

Season three of The Climate Chronicles takes listeners on an immersive journey through the remarkable changes in climate and human culture that shaped the early history of the Holocene, the geological epoch in which humans became the dominant species on our planet. It zooms in on small communities and follows continental trends across thousands of years, all while unpacking the creative detective work that distinguishes the sciences of the past.

For an episode trailer and a transcript complete with citations, as well as maps, graphs, infographics, and other images, visit TheClimateChronicles.com.