collapse in Peru

Wonderful piece on the Nazca collapse on BBC news. You may not know the Nazca - it was the first time I heard about them- but I am sure you have seen their most famous works. These were the people that lived in Peru more than 1,500 years ago and left enormous drawings on the desert floor. These drawings are many kilometers in size and they have made that particular desert very famous. A desert of the Nazca's own making, I am afraid to say. The images can be seen from very high up and they have featured prominently in books on UFO's and extraterrestrials. The German UFO man par excellence, Erich Von Daniken was very fond of the Nazca drawings.

However, perhaps more surprising is that the Nazca once lived in a fertile landscape protected by forests of the huarango tree. This rather bizarre tree is one of the few that can fix nitrogen -through a symbiosis with micro-organisms-. Even so it is a rather rare skill in nature. The huarango tree protected the land where the Nazco thrived and where they built a very sophisticated society that came to a rather sudden end about 1,500 years ago. If this sounds familiar you are absolutely right. Many advanced societies have abruptly disappeared leaving nothing but enormous deserted artifacts behind.

These great mysteries have always intrigued people and they have led to much speculation. How can an advanced society at the height of its power abruptly fall apart? Recently we have uncovered much evidence to elucidate these questions. And time and again the answer has been very simple indeed. Those very smart and advanced humans destroyed the habitat they lived in. The process often took a long time and no doubt many in those societies must have seen it coming. However, their warnings were unheeded. Worse than that, in many cases there is clear evidence that the destruction accelerated prior to the collapse. The society's prominence was often at an all time high right before it fell apart. The Nazco are a chip off the old block.

For many years the Nazco demise was attributed to a strong El Nino event that took place about 1,500 years ago. However, as you can surely imagine, sophisticated and well-run societies are rarely wiped out by a single catastrophic event, no matter how big. Unless they live on an island that blows apart and disappears, people will survive and the survivors will rebuild.

One thing humans are very good at, and have always been very good at, is dealing with catastrophes. There is ample evidence for example, that ancient Alexandria survived many disastrous floods before it finally collapsed. Even in "primitive" times, people were smart and ingenious enough to deal with such events and they would quickly manage to rebound, much like we do today.

New evidence has been presented that the Nazca brought about their own demise through deforestation. The deforestation left them very vulnerable and turned their once fertile soil into desert. It also exposed them to flooding and other destructive events. It now appears that a big El Nino became the straw that broke the camel's back.

The Nazca are yet another example of an advanced society that dug its own grave. The unfortunate fact is that we seem to learn very little from what happened in the past. As the saying goes, he who ignores history is bound to repeat it. And repeat it we will, only this time on a much larger scale.