The Indus Valley civilization, located in present-day Pakistan and India, went through four periods of intense drought, which ...

One of history's biggest questions is: "How does an entire civilization disappear?" One can comprehend how an object or even a city is lost, buried, or destroyed, but an entire group or nation of ...

In my research focused on early farmers of Europe, I have often wondered about a curious pattern through time: Farmers lived in large dense villages, then dispersed for centuries, then later formed ...

Archeologists beam lasers from the sky to unearth ancient settlements hiding in plain sight. Lidar uses laser pulses to penetrate dense vegetation, revealing human-built structures underneath. The ...

Climate data offers clues to what might have happened to people of the Indus River Valley and how that might relate to our own warming world.

Long drought cycles reshaped settlement choices in the Indus region. These climate stresses likely contributed to its slow ...

Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such ...

According to National Geographic, the map depicts distances between gates in the wall surrounding the Mesopotamian city of Nippur, but for decades experts questioned its accuracy. The locations of ...

Successive major droughts, each lasting longer than 85 years, were likely a key factor in the eventual fall of the Indus ...