James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

A publication from 2006 recently came to my attention, providing additional proofs for the massive c.4000-3500 BCE climate shift which dried out the large Saharasian Desert Belt region (North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia), and some of the social changes which attended that climate change from lush forested grasslands, into hyperarid hardpan deserts and sand dunes.

This paper by Brooks was an excellent bit of work, but did not go into issues such as child treatment, status of women, sexual and family factors, nor the degeneration of social conditions into slavery or caste systems, and other factors so clearly related to social violence and warfare-conquest. Those were covered in detail within my Saharasia publications.  Brooks did not cite my prior work, possibly due to not knowing about it.

However, Brooks' more recent study is interesting for several reasons beyond the basic confirmation of my determined chronology of the Saharasian climate transformations, as well as how that transformation elicited severe social changes in the Old World regions so affected.

For example:

1.  Brooks documents a chronology for climate transformations within many of the same sub-regions of what I call the Saharasian Desert Belt, with dates that are very close to my own.   The timing of climatic changes from wet to dry in the Sahara Desert are reflected roughly identically across Libya, Egypt, Mesopotamia and South Asia (Indus-Sarasvati region), the latter taking place most strongly later in the process.  This aspect was thoroughly documented in my book Saharasia, in an archaeological-historical reconstruction spanning the period roughly from c.10,000 BCE to c.1900 CE.  An analysis of social impacts of Saharasian desertification was also undertaken using standardized and peer-reviewed cross-cultural data from 1170 different world cultures, in a quadruple-blind control procedure that generated the first world maps of human behavior as derived from global ethnography.  Numerous maps were generated of cultural-social factors revealing a Saharasian geographical pattern mirroring the Saharasian Desert Belt.

My findings were published in a major book, Saharasia, with additional summary papers in peer-reviewed history or anthropology journals, or as book chapters, going back to the original doctoral dissertation of 1986.

2.  Additional teleconnections with similar dates of desertification are identified by Brooks in the Peruvian region of South America, indicating long-distance climate teleconnections from the Saharasian Desert Belt to distant world regions.  I previously wrote about these long-distance influences in more modern contexts, in two papers, where the primary desert region of Saharasia was contrasted against all other desert regions around the world, as secondary deserts which formed in climatic response to primary Saharasia:

Slowly the world of classical science is catching up to ideas firstly pioneered by Wilhelm Reich, and later corroborated by myself in this large global study of desert-formation and human behavior, which was by itself also a solution to what Reich termed the "Riddle of the Origins of Human Armoring".

For the skeptic, I should also point out, the Saharasia findings have been subjected to extensive constructive, and some destructive criticism.  But the basic findings and methodology had already been immersed in the acid of focused scientific critique and analysis, well before the first peer-reviewed publications appeared. I presented my findings before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to the Association of American Geographers, to the Arid Lands Society, and at some smaller academic venues and conferences.  Not once has any serious flaw in the data or methodology ever been identified, nor has any fact-based criticism emerged into public discussion.

The findings nevertheless stirred up a lot of animosity within some sex-negative and/or politically-inspired circles.  Elsewhere, it caused befuddlement in how a new method of geographic analysis was applied to answer ancient historical, ethnographic and psychological questions related to human behavior.  In so doing, it violated many sacred cows and bibliographies of the Old Guard, and hence was for a long time placed in a prominent position on the Index Expurgatorius of modern scientism.  Even many "Reich followers" find it too perplexing to fit into narrow world views based upon lingering mystical attitudes, or "politically correct" ideas of multiculturalism, supposing that all human cultures are the same.  No so.   While some human societies more decidedly relaxed, sex-positive and peace oriented, unfortunately too many others are deeply suffering from extreme sexual disturbances, beating their children and wives often in ritualistic manners, and producing large numbers of extremely violent psychopaths as a consequence.  And, they are still today found in highest concentration across the Saharasian Desert Belt.  (Heresy!)

The world of Natural Science is catching up to the findings in my Saharasia, as new generations of scientists and scholars can't help but ask some of the same questions, and stumble over the same findings as were raised and observed in my original field work, or dug out from old texts in libraries, all showing similar geographical patterns and time-lines, and described firstly in the early 1980s.

I subsequently had multiple invitations to submit summary papers in specialized scientific literature, but no mainstream academic press was willing to publish the book with the full attention to detail as I demanded.  So it was self-published, and now is into the third printing with a newly updated 2nd edition containing an all-new Appendix article "Update on Saharasia", which goes into more recent findings in archaeology which support the overall discovery.

For additional information, see the Saharasia book and "Update" article, and these prior reports:

A hat-tip to Marinus van der Sluijs, for bringing this important paper of Brooks to my attention.

James DeMeo, PhD

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

- George Orwell

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