- Study links fall of civilisation with changes in rain pattern
It wasn’t raiders from the north but a weakened monsoon that spelled doom for the Indus valley civilisation, suggests a study published this week.
Geologist Anil Gupta at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and fellow Indian and American scientists have analysed monsoon behaviour over thousands of years through geological studies and connected it to archaeological findings.
They say that changes in the Indian monsoon over the past 10,000 years may explain the spread of agriculture in the subcontinent as well as the rise and fall of the civilisation that produced Harrappa.
The last dates seem to correspond with the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age so it appears the technique has some currency.