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The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

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_The Long Summer_ by Brian Fagan is in essence a follow up of his excellent earlier work, _The Little Ice Age_, a book that explored the effect of a particular climatic episode on European civilization between the years 1300 and 1850. Fagan expanded his focus greatly in _The Long Summer_ as in this work he analyzed the effects of various climatic events since 18,000 B.C. on the course of Stone Age life, early farming societies, and the evolution of civilizations in Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Americas, covering climatically-influenced human history from the settlement of the Americas to the origins of the Sumerians to the conquest of Gaul by Rome (which was fascinating) through the end of the Mayan and Tiwanaku civilizations (in Central and South America respectively). As in _The Little Ice Age_, Fagan dismissed both those who discounted the role climatic change had played in transforming human societies and those who believed in environmental determinism (the notion that climate change was the primary cause of major developments in human civilization).

Fagan provided many examples of climatic change affecting human history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change - and resulting alteration in the ecology of the region - lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally more dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes included increased mobility - and the end of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer attached to certain areas - and the development of the bow and arrow, much more effective in dense forest against solitary, skittish prey.

While Europeans adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans became dependent upon a relatively moist area of oak and pistachio forests that extended from modern Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not developing agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but rather relied on wild plants, they nevertheless developed some of the early signs of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and other tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they collected each year, supplemented by wild grass seeds and wild gazelles.

While the development of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass stands was a response to climatic and ecological changes brought on by the end of the Ice Age, their eventual end was also largely brought upon by the onset of a series of intense droughts thanks to a remarkable and seemingly distant event around 11,000 B.C.; the draining of the immense Lake Agassiz, a huge meltwater lake that lapped the retreating Laurentide ice sheet for 1,100 km in modern day Canada and the U.S. The lake rose so much that it eventually burst its banks and flooded into what is now Lake Superior and then onto to the Labrador Sea. So much Agassiz meltwater floated atop the dense, salty Gulf Stream that for ten centuries that conveyor of warm, moist air to Europe ceased, among other things plunging southwestern Asia into a thousand year drought. This drought eliminated the groves that the Kebarans depended upon, ending their prehistoric society, though not before the first experiments with cultivating wild grasses. Eventually villages arose that existed primarily dependent and then completely dependent upon cereal agriculture, on grain crops planted and harvested by the people themselves. In such places as Abu Hureyra in modern Syria full-fledged farming arose by 9500 B.C. as a response to drought, to the end of the oak-pistachio belt and the decline of game.

Just as drought lead to early experiments with pre-agricultural communities and then to the actual cultivation of grains, it may have also lead to the domestication of wild goats and sheep in southwestern Asia and of cattle in what would become the Sahara Desert. The arid conditions for instance in southwestern Asia between 11,000 and 9500 B.C. lead to a concentration of game and of humans around the increasingly few permanent water sources, an event that would allow hunters to intimately know individual herds, even individual animals, allowing for these ancient humans to learn how to control the few key members of herds, to selectively cull undesirable members to change the characteristics of that herd's offspring, and how to eventually capture and pen some or all of the herd for later consumption.

It was amazing to me how different the climate and terrain of ancient man truly was. Those who discount the effects of climatic change upon human history should consider how different the world of 6200 BC was. In this year - the time of the famed flat-roofed settlement of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey - farmers lived on the shores of the vast, brackish Euxine Lake to the north of the Anatolian plateau (what would become the Black Sea) and the Laurentide glacier was still retreating in northern Canada. In this year (more or less) began what has been called the Mini Ice Age as vast amounts of Laurentide meltwater suppressed the Gulf Stream, plunged Europe into colder and drier conditions, produced a profound drought in the Mediterranean, and caused ocean waters to rise so that Britain was finally severed from the continent.

Also quite interesting were the several prehistoric societies Fagan touched upon, such as the Kebarans, the `Ubaid people of 5800 B.C. southern Mesopotamia (they predate the Sumerians), the Linearbandkeramik communities of 5600 B.C. Europe, and the early fifth millennium B.C. Badarians of the Nile Valley, groups I was completely unfamiliar with.

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization is another of Brian Fagan's volumes on the interaction of climate and human history. (Others I have read are the Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, and Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations). As with the others, this book chronicles the changes in climate throughout the globe and notes the changes effected in the human condition. Whether there is actually a direct correlation between the two or not it would be difficult to really prove since historic events are nonrepeatable, but the frequency with which major changes in human behavior have occurred when climate has shifted is certainly very suggestive. Like most such claims, however, there is probably more to the reality of the situation than is apparent from this distance. His topic, however, is not without significance for our own world, so I highly recommend reading it!

The author discusses El Nino, the Southern Oscillation, and the Gulf Stream "conveyor belt" and the effects of the introduction of increased fresh, cold water into it as he does in his other books. A more complete discussion of these phenomena was given in Little Ice Age, however, so if the reader is a little confused by the more limited introduction in this book or is simply curious about them, he/she should definitely read LIA for clarification.

Some of the author's points were not new to me. In particular I had read a collection of articles on the concept of human evolution as driven by continental drift and its effect on the Gulf Stream and climate. I have also recently read a book (Secrets of the Sands: The Revelations of Egypt's Everlasting Oasis), which discusses climate change and lifestyle, in this instance that in Egypt and its Oases. The theory that the invasions of the Sea Peoples into Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt were climate driven had been discussed as early as the '60s and '70s. Other points were probably predictable but had never occurred to me, for instance that the attacks on settled societies by desert invaders were driven by the desperate living conditions of the latter with a major dry spell. Most of the history of the ancient near east is studied from the perspective of the city dwellers, the marginal populations being treated as "unfortunate" intrusions which brought collapse. One almost gets a sense that they did so arbitrarily just to be difficult!

An interesting book. It might provide something of a background for courses on ancient civilization. Certainly it would make the ebb and flow of nomadic populations and their impact on the settled societies they boardered more sensible.

For those WRITING PAPERS in history, climatology, sociology, and political science: one might look at the effects of climate on ancient societies and predict the likely outcome of a similar down turn on today's populations. Look at writers like Per Bak (How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criticality), whose studies of sentinel events suggests that every possible event will ultimately occur with a different probability and at unpredictable times, or Stuart Kaufman (At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity) whose work suggests that such events actually help increase organization. How might these authors' works actually support Fagan's thesis? What would they say about the future of our own civilization?

In this highly informative book, author and professor of anthropology, Brian Fagan, looks at the changes in climate that have racked the Earth since the end of the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago. During these years, as civilization began, and then spread, periodic and unpredictable climate changes have affected human history, often with catastrophic results. With chapters covering climactic events from 18,000 years ago to right up to the present, the author spins a fascinating tale of climate and history, as they changed together throughout the millennia.

Overall, if found this to be a very interesting book. On the down side, its various chapters do not tie together in a progressive unfolding of history, but instead hop from subject to subject, like a series of articles. But, that said, this is a fascinating book. The author has an excellent grasp on both human and climactic history, and he succeeds in putting them together to tell the story of mankind, bringing out information that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

I really enjoyed this book, and must admit to have found its lesson of unpredictable, but inevitable, climate change to have been quite sobering. If you want to understand human history, and I mean really understand it, then you must read this book!

Fagan adds a new dimension to the failure of civilizations outside value reversals and psychological self-destruction posed by Brooks Adams, Spengler or de Tocqueville. Data from a variety of sources, not available until now, correlates with history the impacts of climate on civilization. Fagan opens with a curious personal experience - his small sailboat on treacherous Spanish waters, passed by cargo-laden hulks seemingly oblivious to nature's furry. This introduction becomes a wonderful analogy for the "scale of our vulnerability". As we complicate society and "tame" nature we also massively increase the calamity of nature's accumulating response. The Sumerian city of Ur becomes our first tour and what a tour it is. Fagan hits his stride, crystallizing his point when Sumerians are his centerpiece. Conceived around 6000 BCE as a collection of villages already employing canals for irrigation, the region suffered a monsoon shift driving Sumerians to increase organization through innovation. Hence, invention of the city by 3100 BCE. Volcanic induced climate shift eventually ran the Sumerian ship aground, as similar shifts did for others, not only starving the populous but dissolving faith in their gods, kings and way of life. But, Fagan writes, "The intricate equation between urban population, readily accessible food supplies and the economic, political and social flexibility sufficient to roll with the climatic punches has been irrevocably altered." "If Ur was a small trading ship, industrial civilization is a supertanker." And supertankers split in half now and then. The ability to simply return to farming or hunter gathering is now lost given that so many of us occupy the landscape, competing with everyone else under the same conditions. If some of us once comforted ourselves with notions of shinning up the hunting rifle, returning to nature in our tent during such a calamity - forget it. When societies - stretched to the limit - falter under climate change, stress in the psyche comes to the fore in ways never imagined, even (or especially) in abrasive group-oriented societies like ours. Tribal suspicions lie waiting for such opportunities.

Making light of Postmodernists without trying to, Fagan notes the same human response by cultures separated by thousands of years, different continents, "meaning and value" systems; "In both the Old World and the New, human societies reacted to climate traumas with social and political changes that are startling in their similarities." Universal human truths after all.

"But if we've become a supertanker among human societies, it's an oddly inattentive one. Only a tiny fraction of people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, entertaining each other... Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed, the most powerful among us subscribe to a theory that says storms don't exist... And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman's ear that he might consider turning the wheel." So ends a well written, at times spellbinding account of our past and warning to our present, ignored at our own peril.

Fagan grew careless in checking over his manuscript. Where I possess some expertise I caught numerous errors, and therefore don't trust any of the information in this book, although I found the subject interesting and worthy of a good popular treatment.

The author treated the Medieval era sloppily. Druids did not "compete" with Christianity through the 5th century AD. Most of them were murdered by the Romans, the survivors losing influence. The Celts (their elite, the only ones who counted) had adopted Christianity by the 3rd century, and spread out all over Europe, even to Italy, as missionaries and teachers. Perhaps Fagan is confusing Druidism, a pagan religion, with the brilliant and tolerant Pelagian "Celtic" Christianity that flourished from about the 3rd to the 8th centuries, survived in enclaves -- possibly, as some claim, influencing dissenting Protestantism many centuries later. There were plenty of European pagans in the 5th century, but they resided in the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic lands, which weren't converted till later.

Where does he get the idea that Gothic architecture began as early as the 10th century, which was the heyday of the Romanesque style? Gothic architecture appeared tentatively in the mid-12th century, but the Gothic era spanned the late 12th century through the 15th, with the 13th century as its most creative period.

Even more worrisome than the careless Medieval research are Fagan's maps and illustrations. First of all, I recognized some maps and drawings from other books but can't find them cited in the credits. Perhaps because several were taken from other sources, there's a frequent lack of correspondence between text and picture, or simply an incomplete drawing. Examples: On p. 16 Western Spain is covered in dark gray, but there's no legend for dark gray. On p. 81, in a section on the Kebarans, I looked in vain to find the name "Kebara" on the map. Worst of all, on p. 163 the illustration shows the phallic Egyptian god "Mut." The text names this god as "Min." There are many other graphics with similarly irksome problems.

I remember the first edition of MacNeil's ENGLISH LANGUAGE having similar problems with poorly proofed maps and illustrations, and a corrected edition being hastily published. Fagan needs to do the same with this book, or his reputation will suffer.

Nice introduction into the mechanics of climate change.

Fagan writes with the voice of someone with nothing to prove, who is simply sharing observations and is perfectly willing to let the reader determine the implications for themselves.

But this book can be unsettling -- it attacks (quite successfully, in my view) a fundamental assumption with which many of us live: that our planet is a stable place, and bad things are caused by extraordinary events. Not so, says Fagan! Hostile times come and go, and shifts can be precipitated by the most ordinary of happenings. (e.g. gradual warming of North America may have precipitated the last ice age.)

I look forward to reading more of Fagan's work.

This is a good book on the effects of climate on history. The other reviews (11 as of this writing) tell the good points. I merely want to add a cautionary note: Dr. Fagan is prone to give only the "climate did it" side of what are often very complex arguments. Most scholars would generally agree with him, and where there are differences I think he is usually on the right side, but he can get too simplistic. Significantly, the cases he knows best are told with more nuance and detail. The story of the Chumash of the Santa Barbara area (where he lived for many years) is particularly good: he shows how they responded creatively and thoughtfully to varying climates. He is also knowledgeable about, and thus nunanced when writing about, Europe and the Atlantic. He is farther from home with the Maya; he gives the most likely scenario for their fall, which involves drought as the key factor, but does not discuss other theories (warfare, trade route shifts, distant power shifts...) that have at least enough merit to be advocated by many Mayanists. Still farther from home is the Tiwanaku case, where he credits the fall of Tiwanaku on drought that may actually have happened a century or two later than the fall. And he has the Old Kingdom of Egypt falling because drought convinced the people that the pharaohs weren't God after all. Surely the Egyptians were more sophisticated than that, and surely the situation was much more complex. Only in old travel accounts does anyone seriously hold the idea that "those other folks" are so dumb that they think the chief is a god because the volcano erupts or the river floods on time.
Looking over European history, I am struck by how little the shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age affected history. It had its effect, and a lot of people died, but people usually coped well and intelligently. On the other hand, Fagan misses one beautiful case where that shift mattered a lot: the decline of steppe-nomad power and the Silk Road. The Mongols rode out to conquer the world, and the Silk Road flourished, during the Medieval Warm Period. The Little Ice Age ended this--the steppes got too prone to horrible winters that killed the livestock, and the Silk Road got difficult just as the sea lanes were opening up due to Chinese, Arab, Spanish and Portuguese advances in shipping.
Moral: climate affects history greatly, but people don't just let it happen or naively think "God done it." They respond with all sorts of creative and interesting strategies. This emerges from Fagan's book, especially when he talks about Native Americans, but the reader is cautioned to look into the full complexity of the cases he describes.

I really like Brian Fagan's other works. I LOVE the big subject matter. I wanted a 'guns, germs and steel' type of view on how climate has affected civilization. What I got was a book with moments of spectacular vision immersed in a sea of mediocre writing, poor editing, and confusing structure. I wont belabor the already discussed abysmal editing of the graphics (anyone else notice Ecuador and Colombia transposed?), but I will note that I'd definitely not a stickler. I am usually willing to overlook a few minor mistakes, but I found something in virtually every section that was difficult to follow, distracting or just wrong. Chronologies were poorly treated in some sections, with the author jumping timelines and groups in a very confusing manner, basic copy editing neglected (Dos Pilos?), and the tone of some sections left me with the impression that the author had dictated his text and it was reproduced without appropriate editing. There is a big difference between written and spoken wording; verbal emphasis may not translate to the written page very well, and this requires extensive re-work in order to make it intelligible to the reader. The generalized lack of detailed editing contributed to confusion in most sections.
Overall, a fairly good book. However, the above noted issues made for a distracting and convoluted read. Not up to the usual high standards set by Mr. Fagan in his previous work, with responsibility lying with the poor editing.

Fagan surveys a variety of societies and discusses them in some detail, raising interesting ideas throughout. The faults were two-fold, however. First, Fagan is a good writer, and tries to bring his topics to life by emphasizing, for instance, their rich spiritual lives. Much of what he says is highly conjectural, however, and not very scientific.

The second fault of The Long Summer lies in its over-arching themes. Fagan tries to connect the different civilizations, and their fates, using a few very grand metaphors and theories. But I think he has over-reached, and not really proved their utility very well. For instance, he talks of an increasing scale of vulnerability, whereby large civilizations become immune to minor (climatic) disruptions but can be more easily destroyed by very large ones. I found the second half of this argument uncompelling, since the major climatic shifts disrupted all societies, not just complex states. He also refers frequently to a "critical threshold" of vulnerability that societies cross, but he never really demonstrated a threshold per se, just a spectrum.

Fagan also has a few strange biases, though nearly every author does. As has been pointed out in other reviews, he completely dismisses the "big kill" hypothesis, and presents it as a settled topic, when in fact the debate is still going on--a more even-handed treatment would have been appreciated. Another example: he frequently refers to civilizations collapsing and their populations dispersing in the face of drought. But when discussing an Amerindian group, which does the exact same thing, he instead chooses to say that they reverted to a successful, "ancestral strategy" of relocation.

All of these faults are easily overlooked in the midst of a largely good book, however. It is primarily scientific in its approach, though hardly technical, and a good source of ideas. Definitely recommended for fans of "big history."

This is a great synthesis and one that everyone should read. Never mind those who claim some details are not correct. It is the overall scope of the history of this planet that is the important focus. Despite a long history of overpopulation and deforestation, we still have not learned to live reasonably and in harmony with our world. Ancient Egypt was once in a benign Sahara, but it was turned into a desert. Once a society is on the edge of environmental vulnerablity, it takes very little to push it over: a change in weather patterns, a drought, a 500 year cold snap (such as happened in Europe in the 14th century). It seems that we do not learn from the past but have only increased the scale of our vulnerability. Sea levels rise, icecaps shrink, and the world's population is placed in a global experiment of unguessable consequences. We pollute the atmosphere and the seas. This book is a wake up call.
Fagan writes, "Civilisation arose during a remarkably long summer... We still have no idea when, or how, that summer will end."