Things that ended

The order, and why it is this one

Join anywhere. Each stop carries the route with it, so the foot of every question here offers the next one and the way back to this page.

1. 01Why did the Bronze Age collapse?The palaces of Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite empire, Ugarit and the towns of the northern Levantine coast all fell within a few decades of 1200 BC. A drought lasting centuries is now documented in sediment cores from the same period, which gives the collapse a physical context without reducing it to one cause.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
2. 02Why did the Indus cities empty?The Harappan civilisation was spread over about a million square kilometres, more ground than either Egypt or Mesopotamia, then dispersed over several centuries. Work on the river systems it depended on finds a weakening monsoon and the drying of the rain-fed rivers its heartland sat on. Whether the timing matches the cities’ decline is still argued.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
3. 03What happened on Rapa Nui?The island did lose its palm forest, and the standard account, that deforestation caused a population crash and societal collapse before Europeans arrived, has been tested against radiocarbon dates and found wanting. What replaced it is a story of adaptation followed by catastrophe from outside.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
4. 04Can a lost script be read?Decipherment has needed two of three things: a known language, a bilingual text, a large corpus. The famous unread scripts each lack at least two of those, and for the Indus signs there is a serious argument that they do not encode language.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
5. 05How much of human history has been lost?Written history covers a small fraction of human existence, and what survives from that fraction is filtered by material, climate, politics and luck. The size of the gap can be bounded but not measured.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Unknown. Humanity does not currently have a satisfactory answer.Read
6. 06What will be left of us?Human-made materials are being buried in enough quantity that some will fossilise, and with the chemical traces of the last century they make a layer distinct from what lies beneath it. Deliberate communication is much harder. The panel that designed markers for a nuclear waste site planned for languages and institutions that might not last ten thousand years, gave its markers a better than even chance of still standing in most of its estimates, and said a system that both survives and stays readable needs further study before it is built.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read