DO CLIMATE AND MAGNETIC CHANGES CONTROL THE DESTINY OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS IN EAST ASIA?

Civilization has been influenced by the changes of paleoclimate. To reconstruct paleoclimate, various proxy data including temporal and spatial variation of temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind must be included. For instance, paleotemperature proxy includes a composite record of ice cores, stalagmites, tree-rings, lake sediments, historical documents and peat. We propose a new composite paleotemperature proxy model (H16) by stacking available paleotemparature records. To test whether climatic and geomagnetic variations were responsible for the collapse of historic civilizations in East Asia, phenomenological models were designed for each country to reflect the historical changes of dynasties (13 for China, 7 for Korea, 10 for Japan for the past 2000 years) at temperature minima, temperature maxima, magnetic minima, or magnetic maxima. We found that the rise and fall of ancient civilizations in East Asia were less influenced by geomagnetic field intensity variation than that by climate fluctuation. It is apparent that the temperature minima were the most important factor in controlling the destiny of ancient civilizations in East Asia.