Ignored but recorded: British Library interviews Baillie

These passages are very interesting -- At least five times in ancient history the world’s trees stopped growing. You read that correctly: Trees stopped growing in unison across great swaths of the planet, perhaps all of the planet, since writing was invented. and Upon examining the tree-ring record, Baillie noticed indications of severe environmental downturns around 2354 BC, 1628 BC, 1159 BC, 208 BC, and AD 540. The evidence suggests that these environmental downturns were wide-ranging catastrophic events; the AD 540 event in particular is attested in tree-ring chronologies from Siberia through Europe and North and South America. By current historical defintions -- Bronze Age 3300 – 1200 BC Iron Age 1200 - 360 BC We had three bronze age, one iron age and one Christian/common era tree ring "holiday" representing some sort of cosmic-climate collapse.

This is what you might call "The Frontiers of Science" - where science is temporarily over its head, and where the evidence can't be fit into a corpus very readily. Science flounders at such times, trying to hold onto the past gestalts while slowly beginning to realize that those gestalts aren't adequate - and that new ones have to be built that include the stuff that doesn't fit. THAT is when real scientific progress is made. And when researchers and observers are in the middle of that, it all is very unclear where the science is headed. We are in the middle of one of those periods.

Steve G. I'm more interested in getting written records of those times and looking for correlations of 'sky events' and climate descriptions with tree rings.

Baillie also mentioned 3195 BC. Fascinating read. Cheers -