Ancient societies in South Asia, notably the Indus Valley Civilisation, were able to develop resilience to climate change, a new review of scientific studies has shown.
The review examined historical and archaeological studies on climate resilience, especially concentrating on human societies in the past 5,000 years.
It emphasised the necessity and priority of deepening the understanding of long-term resilience dynamics and called for holistic studies in the field of climate resiliology, particularly targeting to effective and efficient resilience measures as well as their transference across time and space.
In the Indian subcontinent, the review presented three instances of how humans developed resilience to changes in climate.
It cited the recent discovery of stone toolkits in India which revealed that humans survived and coped with the Toba super-eruption and its climate implications 74,000 years ago.
“These findings suggest that this catastrophic climate event had minimal effects on humans and did not cause a population bottleneck in the affected region, thereby contributing to a revised understanding of population and climate relations. Along with the general social development, it appears that Pleistocene and later Holocene populations had more adaptive options to respond to environmental challenges, e.g. through mobility, water management, economic transformation and the construction of diverse types of stone structures,” the study noted.
The study presented the instances of the Indus Valley Civilisation, among South Asia’s and the world’s notable civilisations, adapting and developing resilience to climatic changes.
According to some scholars, the Indus Valley Civilisation, along with the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom Egypt, and primitive agriculture-based societies in ancient China, collapsed or were disrupted due to climatic drought events about 4,200 years ago.
“The importance of water for the survival of human populations and their dependent crop and animal species is clear. Studies from ancient South Asia have also highlighted that multiple active interventions focusing on the efficient use of water and capturing of water resources through ponds and reservoirs expanded the overall availability of surface water for agricultural systems,” the researchers wrote.
They cited a modeling study developing on this research. It further confirmed the diverse agricultural/cropping strategies adopted by Indus settlements (c.2600/2500–1900 BC) in different socio-ecological scenarios and under different regimes of precipitation.
The Harappan people of the Indus Valley Civilisation were also able to develop urban planning and water management techniques to adapt to variability in the monsoon.
“Sedentism and urbanism have taken a variety of forms across the globe, and the impact of climate changes upon ancient settlement forms has been much discussed…Especially in large human settlements, e.g. cities, various measures and strategies have been implemented against diverse natural hazards as well as man-made disasters. Urban settlements were very infrequent in the Indus River Basin and the abundant rural settlements and their flexible farming strategies were likely critical for socio-economic resilience in the region,” the paper noted.
Social resilience to changes in climate over the past 5000 years has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Liang Emlyn Yang, Mara Weinelt, Ingmar Unkel and Cameron A Petrie.