The Maya Collapse Was Blamed on Drought. The Full Story Is More Complicated | Hacker News Reader

The Maya Collapse Was Blamed on Drought. The Full Story Is More Complicated

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsHooke4 comments

"Even if the droughts had not been evenly distributed across Mesoamerica, the spared pockets would still have been vulnerable to their second-order effects — political instability, warfare, mass migration."

We're seeing all these second order effects now.

    Those stressors could have pushed even rainy cities past what the local societies could tolerate, as mutually reinforcing crises rippled into each other.

That seems to be the part you're not quoting (sentence right after what you quoted) that rings true to that and I do think should be called out to "make your point".

Like, think back to the "Arab spring" when mass migration attempts were made towards Western Europe (some of it continuing today). In geological history context, a thousand years from now, that's within the timeframe examined in the article for the past, given Europe is now experiencing more drought-like conditions itself as well.

Or think of South American mass-migration attempts from a few years ago, that went all the way up to Canada. Never mind the grab for Ukraine's most prolific wheat production areas (I'll leave it up to the reader to search up maps for this - they do differ by years for example but we can see a general tendency towards anything east of the Dnipro river being a really good area to have under your control in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com