Climate change and early urbanism in Southwest Asia: A review

Abstract

During the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age (c. 6500-4000 BP), the Fertile Crescent in Southwest Asia saw the earliest development of cities anywhere in the world. Climate and environmental factors are generally considered to be significant in these changes because in pre-industrial societies they directly relate to food production and security. The emergence of cities also coincides with a decoupling of settlement and climate trends, suggesting urbanism may have enhanced the adaptive capacity of societies to withstand changing climatic conditions. Urban forms followed a variety of different trajectories, with a much more sporadic and episodic history in the dry farming plains of the North and West of the study region compared to the stable build-up in the irrigated South. Although models dealing with urban growth have emphasized the differential access to agrarian resources as a key driver in promoting hierarchical social systems, climate has rarely been explicitly discussed. In contrast, so-called "collapse" events brought about by extreme, but short-lived, climate changes such as droughts have been blamed for declines in urban and rural populations, social complexity, political systems, and entire empires. However, the extent to which these "collapses" are visible in the archeological record, let alone how far they can be attributed to climate changes, is a matter of intense debate. The archeological and historical record, the variegated environmental conditions, and the deep time perspective on complexity available, make the Fertile Crescent an ideal laboratory for assessing causal links between urban formations and climate fluctuations.

Progress toward SDG‐2: Assessing food security in 93 countries with a multidimensional indicator system

“…Countries whose assessment results are lower than 0.5 are mainly located in Africa and South Asia, such as Kenya, Congo (the), Pakistan, and Afghanistan which are characterized with long‐term tropical climate caused water scarcity and drought and high temperature and rainfall caused low organic matters in soil (Agrawala et al, 2001; Dai, 2011). For Africa, the low food security is also owing to its historical, political, and cultural reasons including political instability and crises, civil conflicts and wars, institutional corruption, misdirected economic policies, and neglect on the farmers (Dodo, 2020; Lawrence et al, 2022).…”

Historical Westward Migration Phases of Ovis aries Inferred from the Population Structure and the Phylogeography of Occidental Mediterranean Native Sheep Breeds

“…In fact, on the basis of archeological and written prehistoric sources [ 124 , 125 ], the evolution of the first domesticated hairy sheep to the woolly sheep also occurred in the domestication center as late as the late 8th to early 7th millennium, and then migrated westward to the occidental Mediterranean basin during the late Copper Age, and then the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Driven by the climatic change from the wetter early Holocene to cooler and drier conditions beginning in the 7th millennium [ 123 , 126 , 127 ], the evolution from the hairy to the veritable woolly sheep would have taken many millennia, after a mutation process due to a retro-gene insertion resulted in graduate coat qualities from the hairy wild ancestor to woolly sheep [ 128 ]. This process, thought to have occurred in Mesopotamia during the later Copper Age [ 123 , 129 ], is presumed as the reduction of the hair and Kemp fibers, as the development of the fine under-wool of the winter undercoat did not change seasonally any more, but grew continuously, as well as, finally, the loss of the hair pigmentation [ 129 ].…”

“…Babelon [ 134 ] mentioned that the most frequently represented animal in Carthage steles was the fat-tailed and woolly sheep typical of the Carthage Republic dominating large parts of the western Mediterranean basin, during the 3rd millennium B.P. Carthage was founded by the Canaanite/Phoenician migrated from Canaan in the southern Levant, where pastoral nomadism became the dominant economy, and the fat-tailed sheep became the dominate sheep variety as a response to climate change [ 126 , 135 ]. Unfortunately, the prehistoric written sources of Carthage, which detailed the fat-tailed sheep breeding, as well as the wool sheep production and ancient wool trade in the occidental southern Mediterranean rim, as described in Egyptian and Roman prehistoric sources, were destroyed during the Punic war [ 136 ].…”

How can research on past urban adaptations be made useful for sustainability science?

“…Focused case studies of urban trajectories differ from heuristic analogs by their greater precision about social and environmental processes, including a more delimited domain and a more explicit problem orientation. Archaeological research by Dan Lawrence and colleagues on trajectories of urbanization and climate change Global Sustainability in Mesopotamia (Lawrence et al, 2021) is a good example of focused case studies relevant to urban sustainability today. Felix Riede's research on the effects of a past volcanic event shows the value of the first level of case-study research on a sustainability-related topic (Riede, 2019).…”