Here is just one more indication that despite what some would like you to believe, the MWP was not a regional “non event”.
From a University of Arizona press release,
Giant Sequoias Yield Longest Fire History from Tree Rings
California’s western Sierra Nevada had more frequent fires between 800 and 1300 than at any time in the past 3,000 years, according to a new study led by Thomas W. Swetnam, director of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world’s oldest trees shows that California’s western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to a new study led by University of Arizona researchers.
Scientists reconstructed the 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on ancient giant sequoia trees, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.
“It’s the longest tree-ring fire history in the world, and it’s from this amazing place with these amazing trees.” said lead author Thomas W. Swetnam of the UA. “This is an epic collection of tree rings.”
The new research extends Swetnam’s previous tree-ring fire history for giant sequoias another 1,000 years into the past. In addition, he and his colleagues used tree-ring records from other species of trees to reconstruct the region’s past climate.
The scientists found the years from 800 to 1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, had the most frequent fires in the 3,000 years studied. Other research has found that the period from 800 to 1300 was warm and dry.
“What’s not so well known about the Medieval Warm Period is how warm it was in the western U.S.,” Swetnam said. “This is one line of evidence that it was very fiery on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada – and there’s a very strong relationship between drought and fire.”
Droughts are typically both warm and dry, he added.
Knowing how giant sequoia trees responded to a 500-year warm spell in the past is important because scientists predict that climate change will probably subject the trees to such a warm, dry environment again, said Swetnam, a UA professor of dendrochronology and director of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
During the Medieval Warm Period extensive fires burned through parts of the Giant Forest at intervals of about 3 to 10 years, he said. Any individual tree was probably in a fire about every 10 to 15 years.
The team also compared charcoal deposits in boggy meadows within the groves to the tree-ring fire history. The chronology of charcoal deposits closely matches the tree-ring chronology of fire scars.
The health of the giant sequoia forests seems to require those frequent, low-intensity fires, Swetnam said. He added that as the climate warms, carefully reintroducing low-intensity fires at frequencies similar to those of the Medieval Warm Period may be crucial for the survival of those magnificent forests, such as those in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Since 1860, human activity has greatly reduced the extent of fires. He and his colleagues commend the National Park Service for its recent work reintroducing fire into the giant sequoia groves.
The team’s report, “Multi-Millennial Fire History of the Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California, USA,” was published in the electronic journal Fire Ecology in February. A complete list of authors and funding sources is at the bottom of this story.
To study tree rings, researchers generally take a pencil-sized core from a tree. The oldest rings are those closest to the center of the tree. However, ancient giant sequoias can have trunks that are 30 feet in diameter – far too big to be sampled using even the longest coring tools, which are only three feet long.
To gather samples from the Giant Forest trees, the researchers were allowed to collect cross-sections of downed logs and standing dead trees, he said. It turned out to be a gargantuan undertaking that required many people and many field seasons.
“We were sampling with the largest chain saws we could find – a chain-saw bar of seven feet,” he said. “We were hauling these slabs of wood two meters on a side as far as two kilometers to the road. We were using wheeled litters – the emergency rescue equipment for people – and put a couple hundred pounds on them.”
To develop a separate chronology for past fires, co-authors R. Scott Anderson and Douglas J. Hallett looked for charcoal in sediment cores taken from meadows within the sequoia groves.
“We can compare the charcoal and tree-ring fire records. It confirms that the charcoal is a good indicator of past fires,” Swetnam said.
Such charcoal-based fire histories can extend much further into the past than most tree-ring-based fire histories, he said. The charcoal history of fire in the giant sequoia groves extends back more than 8,000 years.
Increasingly, researchers all over the world are using charcoal to reconstruct fire histories, Swetnam said. Many scientists are analyzing the global record of charcoal to study relationships between climate, fire and the resulting addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Swetnam’s co-authors are Christopher H. Baisan and Ramzi Touchan of the University of Arizona; Anthony C. Caprio of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in Three Rivers, Calif.; Peter M. Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research and Colorado State University in Fort Collins; R. Scott Anderson of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff; and Douglas J. Hallett of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
The National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest and Calaveras Big Trees State Park provided funding.
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
toby (07:54:13) :
Some people have commented on it already – my concerns are associated with the lower “Historical” graph above.
There is just NO way the temperature of medieval Europe was 7C warmer than the 20th century. Believe me, my Irish ancestors would have been drinking wine to beat the band, rather than sticking to raw whiskey, if they could have grown grapes. There were enough monastic orders in Ireland to introduce grapes if they could. Believe it or not, wine is made in Ireland and Britain today, but only in certain microclimates along the southern coasts.
I agree there was a MWP, and I would not be surprised if it extended throughout the northern hemisphere, and maybe beyond. No one really disputes the MWP basics and that its ending was accompanied by population decline like the Norse Greenland colony, but also the decline of the English colony in Ireland, wars and famines across Europe.
=======
A paper by Mann shows MWP throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf
From the MCA map in Figure 2, you can see the American Southwest was warmer than Ireland.
North America has a population density of slightly less than 23 people per square kilometer at the present time. That average density in no way indicates there are nearly 23 people in every square kilometer. It means there are 0 people in some square kilometers, 2,600 people in other square kilometers, 700 people in other square kilometers, and so forth. Likewise with a hypothetical population density of 1 person per square kilometer. It means there are 0 people in some square kilometers, 2,600 people in other square kilometers, 700 people in other square kilometers, and so forth. The proposition that 57 million could not and did not populate the New World in in 1492AD or before then requires the assumption that it was not possible for the “average” population density of the New World to exceed 1.34 people per square kilometer. To guage the likeliehood of such a proposition, we can look at what we already know from experience.
We know the Eskimo population density in one of the harshest climates on the Earth was about .015 people per square kilometer. We know that the heavily jungled areas of New Guinea supported and still support population densities of 1 person per square kilometer in the most difficult environments of the lowlands and 20 people per square mile in the less difficult highlands. Even the Bushmen of the Kalahari, arguably one of the most nomadic cultures in one of the Earth’s most harsh desert environments managed to achieve a population density of 1 person per square mile or more. The Mongol culture maintained an average population density of 1 person per square mile in the steppes and deserts of Asia. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of the New World were far more populous and civilized food producers and farmers than the Eskimo, Bushmen of the Kalahari, and other neolithic hunter-gatherer cultures. Their cities, suburban towns, outposts, road networks, canals, and irrigation projects attest to their large and civilized (meaning agricultural) populations far in excess per square mile than your average hunter-gatherer cultures and their 1 person per square mile population densities spanning the most forbidding deserts, steppes, mountains, and jungles.
Given the facts of population densities for the most primitive of hunter-gatherer cultures living a nomadic existance across the harshest environments the Earth has to offer versus the much more populous early agricultural civilizations, by what mathematics can it be reasoned and supposed that the “average” population density for all of the New World, including its farming civilizations, would be less than 1.34 people per square kilometer or less than the 1 person per square kilometer found among the Earth’s most primitive and nomadic cultures resident across the world’s emptiest territories?
You understand incorrectly. Nomadic cultures defend their territories. The Mississippian culture of North America spanned much of the watershed of the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland, and Missouri Rivers. This culture was a civilization which built permanent mound cities with canals, irrigation projects, farms, towns, gardens, and other permenent public works. As the farms and cities developed, former nomadic camps were transformed into permanent palisaded fortresses. The ill defined territories of the nomadic clans were tranformed into formal territorial boundaries of a semi-nodic and non-nomidic civilization defended by these permanent fortresses. Far from being the most primitive stone age bands of hunter-gatherers depicted so often, the Mississipian culture was a civilization spanning a good portion of North America and comparable in many respects to the copper-age Celtic civilizations of the Old World. The territories not occupied by the Mississippian culture were not barren of all civilization and civilized population densities either. There were other civilized and semi-nomadic cultures adjacent to the Mississipian culture.
The demise of these civilizations and cultures are not a matter of speculation. Witnesses documented some of their abrupt collapse. Some of the catastrophic population collapses occurred centuries and decades before 1492AD. Others occurred after 1492AD and are undoubtedly the consequence of the exchanges of disease pools between the New World and Old World. The pandemics killed so many people, there was often no one or few left alive as survivors to bury the dead. The political landscape underwent monumental upheavals as the surviving Amerindian cultures competed to takeover the suddenly vacant territories. Maps showing the pre-Columbian locations of the tribes, confederations, and languages are contrasted with the post-Columbian locations. The results and the extent of the catastrophe are obvious.
Wren (10:49:25),
In case you didn’t realize it, Michael Mann has an agenda. Further, ever since his Hokey Stick chart that showed no MWP or LIA was debunked by Steve McIntyre, Mann has been desperate to resurrect his greatly diminished reputation.
To help you out, here is an interactive chart of the MWP: click
Like every other time span covering hundreds of years, there are temperature fluctuations. Mann et al. cherry-picks some of those for his study, which is essentially worthless. The MWP affected the globe, Mann’s self-serving, revisionist history notwithstanding.
[snip]
The issue is not whether the earliest Asian immigrants to North America were fine and wonderful, even civilized by standards of later European immmigrants, with great cities in parts of Central and South America, and numbering in the millions, or not.
The issue is whether the increased frequency of forest fires affecting the measured trees of this study during the middle ages is evidence supporting the MWP’s presence in more than Europe. I think this is evidence, though quite indirect, circumstantial, and not enough to justify a strong opinion. More work along these lines may be helpful.
The MWP and Holocene droughts are well known in the West Coast, Sierras and the Great Basin due to tree rings, sediments, and pollen in from the lakes and playas in the region. Of particular interest are the tree stumps in many lakes and stream beds dating from both the MWP and the logs/stranded groves found at higher altitude. Corroborating evidence also comes from studies of pack rat middens and human settlements showing great stress on both communities at that time. Further evidence can be found in fish scale studies and species counts.
This evidence is also global as it is mirrored in Central and South America.
The evidence for the MWP is overwhelming.
That’s right, the exceptions were included in the overall average. If you want to concentrate on the more habitable woodlands of North America, then assume the Eastern Woodland Culture spanned somewhere around 2.6 million square kilometers. We know that the primitive cultures of New Guinea achieved population densities of up to 20 people per square kilometer. If we assume for the sake of comparisons that the Mississipian culture was incapable of equaling or exceeding the population densities of the less advanced and less well situated cultures of New Guinea, then 20 people per square kilometer times 2.6 million square kilometers for the Eastern Woodland Area gives you a possible Eastern Woodland Culture population of 52 million people. Note, this number does not include any of the other Amerindian populations anywhere else in the New World.
Even if we assume the Eastern Woodland culture was no more successful than the much less civilized (meaning much less agriculturized) hunter-gatherer cultures of today’s South American rain forests, their 2.5 people per square mile population density times the 2.6 million square kilometer Eastern Woodland area results in a possible Eastern Woodland area population of 6.5 million people.
Add the Plains Amerindian culture at 1 person per square kilometer and assuming 2.6 million square kilometers for the plains area, the result is another 2.6 million population of Plains culture Amerindians.
Assuming the remainder of North America except for Mesoamerica, habitable and unihabitable, of about 19 million square kilometers supports an average of only the prehistoric paleolithic population density of about 0.01 people per square kilometer, the result is a population of about 1.9 million people. So, even a very pessimistic estimate based on known populaton densities in the New World and Old World has us at 6.5 million for the Woodland area, 2.6 million for the Plains cultures, and 1.9 million for all other cultures north of Mesoamerica. This comes to a total of 11 million people, before we even begin adding the populations of the Mesoamerican civilizations, the South American civilizations, and all of the other cultures in Mesoamerican and South America.
Anything greater than the most pessimistic examples of real world population densities is only going to increase the hypothetical Amerindian populations of the New World somewhere above a 20 to 30 million population level.
When you then apply a 90% population collapse due to a pandemic of epic proportions as reported by so many historical witnesses, then it cannot be surprising to find the surviving population in the immediate aftermath may number no more than some 2 million to 6 million of their former populations of 50 to 60 million people spread over two continents of 42 million square kilometers, speaking hypothetically.
“As I understand it, the bulk of the population was nomadic, which meant that they shifted sites. If every location in North America was claimed by a tribe, there’d be nowhere to go to find new game, etc. I doubt the .1 person/km estimate was based on land use over many years, but rather land in use at any given time. ”
Just to add to what Patterson said in response to the above about the Mississippian culture. Here are some links.
We also know that most of the Nomadic tribes of North America were actually splinters from the Eastern tribes who left the Eastern region and took the Great Plains by force in response to climatic upheavals during the WMP and Little Ice Age. They became nomadic due to rain and weather making crops unprofitable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeastern_Ceremonial_Complex
We know that the Aztec Empire had about 35 million people. They wrote it down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_codices
The South American continent was very heavily populated. We now know of two more major groups of civilizations other than the Maya and the Inca. One of these new civilizations covered the Amazon and the other settled the Eastern foothills of the Andes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
http://www.theancientweb.com/explore/content.aspx?content_id=45
Another way to look at the Amerindian culture is to realize that Corn, Sweet Potatoes, and Potatoes are Amerindian inventions. Together, they provide about 1.2 billion tons of food today with the potato now becoming the dominant source of calories. Rice and Wheat together provide less than this at around 900 million tons. The potato by itself is the dominant caloric food for Northern Europe from the 1780s onward. These foods dominate the fossil food record up and down North and South America. On marginal land, potatoes and Sweet Potatoes can support 8-12 people per acre including enough livestock to supply protein via milk. On fertile soil, the output will support 20-40 people per acre. If you look at Inca settlements, this figure is close to the latter.
You grossly underestimate the capabilities and accomplishments of our ancestors.
The Inca maintained the Inca Road and a postal system, much like those of the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Chinese, and other civilizations. Much like the Romans, the Inca established inns and communities about every 20 to 22 kilometers along the roadway. The couriers, chasqui, ran and relayed messages and sometimes light packages about every 1.4 kilometers between the inns. Fresh fish from the Pacific coast were delivered to Cusco with a travel time of about 240 kilometers per day. The Inca maintained communicatins all the way from the Pacific Coast, across the Andes Mountains, and deep into the Amzon rain forests far to the east.
The Mayan road system extended across much of Mesoamerica.
The Aztec empire conducted slave capturing raids from Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) far up into the Great Plains where the Canadian Shield begins.
Roads and well worn trade routes existed all the way from the shores of Hudson Bay to the praries of Texas.
The Dorset culture maintained trade routes which extended all the way from the Pacific Coast of Alaska, across Arctic Canada, to Baffin Island, across Northern Greenland and Pearyland, down the eastern coast of Greenland on the Atlantic Ocean.
The Creek nation pursued the Choctaw nation all the way from Old Mexico, into Arkansas and Missouri, across the Mississippi River into Mississippi and Alabama in a bid to wipe them out in a genocide over a dispute and revenge.
Colonization of a continent by foot and by boat takes an amazingly short period of time so long as the population expands at any rate whatsoever.
Wren (10:49:25) :
As I mentioned at (10:15:05), as closely as I can match the map in Mann’s
figure 2, p 1257, his reconstruction shows the area of the Sequoia National
Park as having a surface temperature anomaly of -.1 C for the period 950-
1250. This does not fit very well with the results reported in the Fire Ecology article.
The graph showing the Medieval Warm Period as shown in the graph above
appeared in the IPCC’s 1990 Assessment. I’m not asserting that it was that
warm here, only that at one time the IPCC accepted that it was. There is an
accurate and well cited reproduction of that graph here:
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
I tracked down a copy of this volume and verified it for myself.
Even with so much of New England’s history wiped out by the terrible pandemic, there are traces of both the MWP and the LIA seen in the little we do know. The MWP apparently drove sugar maples northward. Northern Algonquin tapped maples and exploited sugar, but southern Algonquin had no word for sugar and scorned the English for consuming so much of it. It was actually the English who expanded the range of sugar maples southward and towards the coasts during the LIA, by transplanting saplings, which mostly grew beside roads and in what I suppose you could call “orchards.” Sugar maples were very rare in the forests of the south, so rare in fact that Henry Thoreau makes a big deal about finding an old specimen in the Weston woods. (It likely was a final survivor of the maple population which existed before the MWP.)
In the same way the northern range of corn plants was in New England. Less is known about how it moved north and south, but the northern Algonquin hunted more and had no word for “fertilizer,” while the southern Algonquin farmed more and did have a word for fertilizer.
This brings a funny story to mind. There are two words for an oily herring in New England, “Pogy” and “Menhaden.” My more snobby relatives insisted on using the word “Menhaden,” as it sounded more sophisticated, but my more salty and down-to-earth relatives chuckled at them, and used the word “Pogy,” which was derived from a northern Algonquin word for fish, while my snobby relatives pointed out to sea and remarked about a school of “fertilizer.”
In any case, the simple fact fish was used for fertilizer enabled the Algonquin to use the same fields year after year in southern New England, and the suggestion they had a sort of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture is simply incorrect.
A couple of things regarding the fire dependent nature of the giant sequoias, which has not been mentioned so far [for those of you who care about such things], that become obvious even to the non-expert who takes the time to wander around in one of the groves for a while. The first is that many of the oldest and largest trees are in fact made hollow by fire, and that the fire cavities can be the size of a small room in which one can sleep [or live] quite comfortably [I have] which has something to say about the nature of the fires that these trees are subject to, if it can burn through two feet of bark.
A second thing to notice is that when one of the larger ‘grandfather’ trees dies, and eventually falls, is that the deadfall, which for all of the world resembles a train wreck with sections of trunk the size of railcars stretching for hundreds of feet across the forest floor, can persist in this slowly decaying state for hundreds of years. Thus the potential nutritive value that the deadfall represents to the forest and the sequoias themselves is only slowly returned to back to the soil and that therefore it is reasonable to wonder where, [aside from needle fall and cones], where all of the nutrient inputs to the ecosystem are. These large trees add literally tons of new growth to their mass every year which can remain largely locked up in their trunks for millennia, which begs to question how they can support such high growth rates in such an otherwise challenging environment.
A third thing that you will notice is how that many of ‘grandfather’ trees are surrounded by a ring of smaller, younger fir or pine trees whose lifespan is a few hundred years rather than a few thousand years. It is these trees that in a major fire burn and in the form of ash then fertilize the soil in the way that the sequoias thrive upon. I think it can be reasonably said [in a certain way] that these companion trees sacrifice themselves bodily to support the growth of the sequoias. Ironically, it is these burning fir trees that pose the only real fire threat to their sequoia symbionts, the burning trunk of a fir leaning up against the sequoia can lead to exactly the type of fire hollowing damage that we observe and that ultimately makes it possible for a dead sequoia to fall over at all, otherwise they might remain standing dead for a thousand years [not much good even for the squirrels].
Beautiful beings, it’s absolutely enchanting to spend time over a period of days sitting with one of them, I miss being up there.
Anthony
Seems like there’s a fair amount of interest in Pre-Columbian Native American population. When the weather breaks, might be nice to have a guest post by someone who really knows something about the subject.
Looking out the kitchen window just now, I was just reminded of something my buddy Phi wrote a number of years ago after spending some time sitting in the immanent grove with the gods.
A fragment…
…The roving mind of God casts its shadow in our minds,
And like children tracing the shadows of trees on the ground,
We mistake this image made of shadows,
This dimensional flattening of truth,
For the Truth.
Look up!
Look upwards!
Eternity is there to be beheld in its infinite unfolding.
The light that shines through its branches is God,
What it shines upon is you.
~ © φ 2005
… Well, I guess that outs me now as possibly the oddest bulb in the box, or at least having the oddest friends.
Ian McLeod – Schulman began his hunt for a species with better drought sensitivity (Bristlecones) because Sequoias grew too uniformly; basically you couldn’t tell much from the Giant Sequoia because they require a tremendous amount of water to survive (500+ gallons/day) which is why they only grow near steady water sources. Thus a Bristlecone – Sequoia correlation is unlikely and not very useful given that groundwater conditions could not be more different.
Mike D & Pascvaks – This article seems to support MWP…which, in turn is another body blow against the IPCC and the Alarmists. I like this. However, this article does not provide substantial evidence to support MWP…if I am going to criticize Salzer & Mann for junk science, I have to be consistent.
So here are my criticisms:
1. Fire needs a cause or source. Drought doesn’t cause fire. In fact the lack of moisture in the Troposphere during a drought would create less opportunity for lightning strikes and perhaps arguably less frequent fires.
2. I have spoken to the Sequoia Lead Archeologist about anthropogenic fire. It is well known that Native Americans inhabited the entirety of Sequoia and Kings Canyon from the lowlands at 2,000 feet to the alpine region with temporary settlement evidence as high as 11,000 feet. They certainly inhabited the Sequoia belt in the Summers. The landscape the Europeans first saw in California in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s was a “Highly Modified” landscape. Which is to say, the Native Americans used Fire as a tool, often…both for access to steady food supplies and to clear out overgrowth.
3. There is evidence to suggest that the Individual Sequoias (ones with hollowed out interiors from either fire or because they arch over a stream) were used as shelter and for cooking. Sequoia exteriors were also used as fire backstop/shelters.
4. One Native American was ALWAYS made to stand guard and tend the fire at all times. This is specifically true of Native Americans in and around the Kaweah River who spent summers in Giant Forest. Fire was THAT important.
5. This issue has already been addressed by Dr Bartholemew at UC Berkeley
“Fire scars in the rings of giant sequoias describe fire history dating back to the birth of the tree—sometimes as far back as 2,500 years ago. Analysis of tree-ring scars indicates that before settlers came to California low-intensity surface fires, ignited by native people or lightening, burned every five years on average. These small fires cleared only the understory brush and small trees, leaving the larger trees only partially burned and on the whole unharmed. They maintained gaps in the canopy, provided space for developing sequoia saplings, replenished soil, and most likely made hunting and moving around in the forest easier for native people.”
So I suppose the point is that the relationship between humans, fire & Sequoias is not perfectly understood, and simply pointing to increased fire scars and Barking “MWP” isn’t going to prove anything. I believe in the MWP, I just don’t believe the evidence presented above moves the argument further down the road.
The National Park Service has studied the issue extensively yet inconclusively:
Current hard historic evidence on the source of fires in the southern Sierra Nevada is too limited to determine the specific importance of either lightning or Native American causes. Actual patterns of fire across the landscape were probably a result of both ignition sources with the importance of each varying between specific vegetation types and locations. However, within the parks it is argued that the number of lightning ignitions could account for the observed pre- settlement fire frequencies if they had not been suppressed and had been allowed to spread (Swetnam et al 1992; Stephenson 1996; Vale 1998). This contrasts with views which suggest that lightning ignitions were not frequent enough to account for the number of fires that occurred in the Sierra prior to Euroamerican settlement (Reynolds 1959;
Vankat 1970; Lewis 1973; Kilgore and Taylor 1979). The former view is supported by an analysis of past fire occurrence, reconstructed using fire scars, and contemporary lightning ignitions in the East Fork watershed (Caprio 2000 unpublished data). For the period from 1750 to 1849 fires
were recorded during 75% of the years (25% without fires) while during the contemporary period from 1933 to 1999 lightning ignitions (243 total) were recorded for 79% of the years (21% without ignitions), a very similar frequency.
Fire Scars with other evidence might prove the MWP in Giant Forest but there isn’t enough here. For example in nearby Mountain Home State Forest a cataclysmic fire hit virtually every tree in 1297 at the end of the MWP…similar to an 1849 fire that affected multiple groves and watersheds within Sequoia National Park….Both Fires were colossal…does that prove prolonged drought? What proves prolonged drought? I would expect a 500 year drought/warming as the author suggests to show a consistent and escalating sequoia die off along with a renewed forest wide sapling surge circa 1300 post drought.
Lastly, I do not know if the issue has been studied, I would expect increased human activity in the sequoia belt in a major 500 year drought. I would expect them to bring fire with them and hence an increased incidence of fire. In a drought….Sequoias = water. These trees gobble up 500+ gallons a day or they die. So wherever these trees are, even where streams or lakes are dry, even where shrubs and small trees are dying, springs are probably permanent for human use.
@Enneagram
‘THIS IS NOT TRUE AT ALL!, before the pyramids in Egypt were built, there were pyramids in the city of CARAL, Peru, 5000 years ago, a few kilomters north of Lima, the peruvian capital.’
I’m gonna turn me charm on and put this as nicely as I possible can, mkey?
Are you completely and utterly deranged? Since when did one constitute many?
Ancient Egypt expands over several thousand years, like up until ancient Rome went tits up, i.e. right around when Caesar went all dictator on everyone, but of course it took a few hundred years for everything to really fall apart, oh yeah and bunch of, apparently, obnoxious christians.
5000 years ago means 3000 B.C. So lets check the pedia on who’s who in 3000 BC, Wow that’s like 45 years after Djer died, second or third pharao of Egypt in the first dynasty. About a 100-150 years before King Menes created a larger Kingdom.
And the pyramids you seem to mean are the classic egyptian pyramids, but some think the Nubians actually did it first, from where later the Egyptians got it. The early pyramids, which would then be the Nubians and pre-nubians I guess, before they got tourist impressive, weren’t exceptional constructions after all, but more like the ones found in China, just an impressive hill of dirt, or like in northern Europe a impressive pile of stones, but those are still considered pyramids. And although any kind of a pyramid isn’t a sure sign of city civilization still the americas didn’t have a lot of cities to speak of before the europeans came, and from what is known today not much of any unified, or linear, civilization transition at all. Personally I think it’s because of two things, the need to farm, i.e. lack of food, and the need to band together i.e. the lack of threat, which is related to the amount of people, or crazy kings and emperors.
Dendrochronology is pretty cool stuff. When fire is part of a conifer’s reproductive cycle, that’s not “man made”. Forest fires are a fundamental part of the natural lifecycle.
I’m just a passenger on this wonderful jewel of a planet in space. To think that I can change something like the weather is the definition of hubris.
You are erroneously assuming the vast majority of pre-Columbian population lived long enough to directly meet and confront a European. On the contrary, something on the order of 90% or more of the Amerindian populations perished from the pandemics within the first century of the Columbian contacts. Nearly all of the victims of these pandemics died without ever meeting a European or even knowing of the existence of the Europeans. By the time of the 17th Century colonizations of North America (excluding Mesoamerica), the survivng Amerindian populations were but a small percentage of the earlier populations and still dwindling fast as disease continued to ravage their numbers at an astonishing rate.
In the confrontations between the Euro-American colonists and the Amerindian nations, it was the Amerindian nations who tended to be better armed with firearms and other arms on frequent occassions than their Euro-American adversaries. The French and later British supplied arms to support the warfare against the colonists on the battlefields of the Eastern Woodlands. In the later conflicts on the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Far West, the Amerindians were often better armed with weapons such as the latest Henry repeating rifles against the cavalry’s single-shot carbines and the infantry’s muzzle-loading Springfield rifles. Historians who tallied the casualties resulting from the Indian wars and massacres north of Mexico found the Amerindians inflicted more casualties upon their adversaries than were inflicted upon themselves. It was the attrition of their already reduced populations resulting from the constant warfare against each other and against the colonizers which overwhelmed and doomed their efforts to dominate their territories against all competitors.
The catastrophic extent of the “disease” and pandemic is most certainly not an “assumption” or an “unjustified assumption” by any stretch of the imagination. The rate is directly countable in places where observations occurred and were written down for posterity. The European colonists also lost heavily as disease, famine, and privation often wiped out a third or more of their colonial population in only one or two years at a time. Examples of such records of Colonial and Amerindian losses to disease are the Aztex-Spanish records; the contemporaneous observations in New Hispaniola, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, New England, Newfoundland; and the archeological ruins of the civilizations. The depopulation of the Amerindian cultures by diesease is an absolute certainty. The percentage of loss in a given decadal and century period is more problematic because of the major gaps in the understandably fragmentary observations and written records establishing precise dates and numbers.
The situation was so dire, the Massachusetts Bay Colony lost about one third of its colonists in the first winter, another third refused to stay and returned home to England, and the last third suffered more horrific losses before a high birth rate of nearly ten children per family and improving conditions of food and shelter permitted the colony to survive and expand its numbers exponentially.
It has often been observed that the population of Rome was sustained only by a very high rate of immigration into the city. The crowded living conditions and and sanitary circumstances maintained a very high rate of mortality due to disease among the city’s inhabitants. This was yet another reason why the wealthier city dwellers appreciated the opportunity to vacation away from the city during the more oppressive seasons when disease was more rampant in the city. On the occasions in which the City of Rome was no longer the preferred destination of immigrants seeking opportunities for a better life, the city abruptly shrank greatly in population, because there were no longer enough replacements for its constant loss of population to disease.
For Amino:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus [Deckle Edge] (Hardcover)
~ Charles C. Mann (Author)
A mostinteresting book to read, about the Americas and American Indians. A bit of political correctness in it, but not all that much. And yes, the eastern American Indians did purposely burn the forest floor every yeat. This made the trees in the forests to be more widely spaced apart, creating great habitat for the critters the eastern American Indians hunted for food. In Europe, where this forest management wasn’t practiced, there was and still is little habitat for critters.
Natural forests have darn little habitat for ground animals.
Mike D. (21:06:08) :
American Indians started fires where the giant sequoias are?
You need to provide some sort of evidence for saying that, not just evidence they started grassland and shrubland fires.
You are trying to produce a list of reason why there would be an increase from 800–1300 AD but your list didn’t include the Medieval Warm Period. Is this because you want to say there was no Medieval Warm Period?
You seem to be interested in historical data. There is data from around the world that the Medieval Warm period was global wand not just regional to Greenland.
see here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/jo-nova-finds-the-medieval-warm-period/
see here also:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/29/the-medieval-warm-period-a-global-phenonmena-unprecedented-warming-or-unprecedented-data-manipulation/
Humans often find it useful to prompt the “natural lifecycle” to move along at times, places, and directions more convenient to humans. If a natural lightning strike does not clear the understory of the forest to the liking of the humans, the humans apply a little of their own lighning to get the job done sooner. If a sugar maple tree isn’t where you find it convenient to have onem, you help nature along by moving a sugar maple to the palce you can use one more conveniently.
Interstate Highway I-70 generally follows the same route froom Washington D.C. to St. Louis, Missouri as the earlier National Highway in use since the 18th Century. The National Highway was established generally along the same path used by the Amerindian cultures as their roadway through the Eastern Woodlands. The Amerinidans established their roadway through the Eastern Woodlands using the pre-existing game trails of Bison, elk, and other large game animals. Keeping the roadway free of weeds and undergrowth without the assistance of industrial age earthmoving equipment and large animals was problematic, until you used fire to keep the paths clear.
DesertYote (08:48:44) :
Ed Murphy (22:08:42) :
Thanks a lot. I was looking at this last night after my post. I thought that maybe the ring density could indicate drought, but I was not sure if I was looking at things correctly.
You’re quite welcome, it most definitely indicates drought in the rings. This was a root corner at the time of the first fire, a bit above the base of the tree, that’s why it burned a little more significantly while the less protruding parts of the trunk didn’t show much. With each wound covered, this area protruded even more, exposing the area to more burn damage in later fires.
You can see the duration of the tree closing the wound, and how much extra energy went into that effort. In the later fires the tree didn’t fully close the wound before the next fire, as the whole tree got larger and wider.
Eventually all this evidence was covered over by further growth over the years, so this was a surprise to UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research people. The wide rings also likely correspond with the years around solar minimum and the narrow rings with years around solar maximum, no doubt in my mind. If man were involved, the pattern would be irregular in my opinion.
@Greg
‘Dendrochronology is pretty cool stuff.’
I hope you’re proud of being who you are, because not even a comp geek, or nerd, in general find that kind of stuff: Cool.
What would be cool is getting average joe understanding, or at least seeing, time. Figure this, can you actually imagine a hundred years back even fairly accurately? Hint, you get it more right the more you know.
But in simple terms, no dendrochronology is not cool, it’s a bunch of bull sht. Figure this, that tree rings and like ice cores are converges before the claim of accuracy. Nobody actually knows anything about the actual accuracy in time before hand, it’s like all extrapolation after the fact. :p
Greater frequency of forest fires is just another benefit of a warmer clime, right?
Wren (10:26:55) :
I find a serious fracture in your ‘science’ argument, namely, you keep talking about the Mann Hockey Stick graph as if it valid for determining temperature during the Medieval Warm Period.
You are ignoring the NAS report in that regard.The Mann Hockey Stick graph is not trustworthy for determining temperature during the Medieval Warm Period.
.
Here is a graph from page 14 of the NAS report on Mann et als work. It does not resemble the Hockey Stick graph. It is the smoothed graph of data that is far more trustworthy for determining temperature than Mann et als method:
http://books.nap.edu/books/0309102251/xhtml/images/p200108c0g14001.jpg
.
And this is from page 21 of the NAS report:
Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Science does not support that the Mann Hockey Stick graph is an accurate record of temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period.
I know you will go on promoting the Mann graph Wren. I am seeing that you are an advocate for global warming and not an unbiased person.
I did not write all of this for you but for readers who are looking for the truth. I hope they read the entire NAS report for themselves and see that the Mann et al graph is not to be trusted as accurate temperature data.
link to the NAS report:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=R1
Austin (12:08:51) :
D. Patterson (12:40:19) :
I know this is way off topic, but do either of you know if Indians in the area that is now the Contiguous 48 practiced human sacrifice similar to the Mayans?