Indus Valley Civilization’s Collapse Explained

The Antikythera Mechanism used to be on the top of my list until I read about Gobekli Tepe. That place fills me with awe to near bursting. I plan to visit this year.

The site is a bunch of concentric T shaped monoliths - kind of like Stone Henge. Except the stones are cut more cleanly, covered in beautiful animal reliefs and it is nearly 8000 years older than stone henge. Activity suggest its origins could reach as far back as 20,000 years ago. And the reason the site has survived intact till this day is because whatever culture built the place decided to bury it. There are all sorts of theories as to whether a hunter gatherer society could really build such a place. Whatever the case, this discovery gives the typical timeline of history a very hard erm time.

Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient, and with such primitive quarrying tools. The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (Layer III) contains monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. Four such buildings have been uncovered, with diameters between 10–30 meters (33–98 ft). Geophysical surveys indicate the existence of 16 additional structures. Layer II, dated to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) (7500–6000 BC), has revealed several adjacent rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime, reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors. The most recent layer consists of sediment deposited as the result of agricultural activity.

At present, Göbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and rewarded or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society. We cannot "read" the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site; the variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic. As there seems to be little or no evidence of habitation, and the animals depicted on the stones are mainly predators, the stones may have been intended to stave off evils through some form of magic representation; it is also possible that they served as totems.[31] The assumption that the site was strictly cultic in purpose and not inhabited has also been challenged by the suggestion that the structures served as large communal houses, "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/musi-...

The researchers have discovered some ancient changes in the hydrologic regime of rivers in north-west India. There's a big step from here to actually explaining civilizational collapse. Particularly, two factors argue against such a narrow explanation. First, the region was still agriculturally quite fertile after these changes in the monsoon pattern; the later Mahajanapadas did quite well in this area. Second, the contemporary Sumerian civilization was not destroyed, despite being affected with even more serious ecological problems (its heartland is now a mixture of marsh and desert). Its center simply shifted north, and it gradually transformed into the Babylonian civilization. With no shortage of fertile areas in the Indian subcontinent, the reasons why the Indus Valley civilization failed to either adapt or shift its center of gravity and instead completely disappeared from history are still, I believe, an open problem.

Original article abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/24/1112743109.abst...

I wonder how sensitive our modern society is to similar agriculturally relevant factors.

It's not a mainstream position in linguistics that Sanskrit is a direct ancestor language of Latin. The overwhelmingly most popular theory is that both are ultimately descended from different branches of proto-European. Latin is from th centum branch and Sanskrit is from the satem branch (which includes Proto-Slavic as well). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centum-Satem_isogloss

The blog you cite shows serious signs of crackpotterry, as do its comments.

Vastly less sensitive because humans have become vastly more skilled at getting what they want and need from the planet and the biosphere.