[yterdy]

*in Europe and Asia.

I kind of weep for the loss of oral and comprehensible physical histories in the Americas and Africa, since scholarship like this shows that one can combine those with unlikely natural records and scientific analysis to triangulate on remarkable narratives about our past.

[DoughnutHole]

If 536 was particularly bad due to a massive volcanic eruption blotting out the sun, they can't have been having a great time in the Americas or Africa either.

536 would have stiff competition from every year of the century following 1492 for the title of "Worst Year to be Alive in the Americas".

[yterdy]

That's not an unfair assumption to make, but it is an assumption, since no records pertaining to conditions in Africa or South America are mentioned (or Australia and on Pacific islands, for that matter). That's where my despair comes from; a consideration of the peoples of those regions was not included, even though the headline seems to be a general statement about human life on Earth in 536.

[twblalock]

This is where history and archeology diverge.

We know how bad things were in Europe and East Asia because written records survive which describe the crop failures etc. We don't have records from that time period from Africa or South America. All we can do is assume that people there suffered as well, due to the global nature of the problem.

Sometimes people get left out of historical narratives because there just aren't any written records. You can make assumptions, or you can try to make stuff up, but an intellectually honest historian is also likely to just say "we can't know."

In contrast, archaeologists will try to make a case for how hierarchical a society was, or whether it was male-dominated, or what kind of religion it had, on the basis of a few tombs belonging to "high-status individuals" and a couple of pieces of pottery. It's always a bit of a stretch. A lot of what archaeologists believed about prehistory. especially migrations of people groups, has been overturned by genetic studies in the past decade. David Reich wrote a good book about it several years ago, which is probably itself outdated now due to the pace of discovery in that field.

[yterdy]

"The global nature of the problem" is also an assumption; there is the chance that, should oral histories in West and Central Africa have survived, or more was known about surviving, undeciphered Mesoamerican and Andean records, we might have learned of differing conditions outside of the Global North. In both cases, our inability to access those sources of information is not an accident of nature, but the result of several historical campaigns of cultural or total genocide.

I think you're missing my point, which is that the erasure of these regions from the record (which runs through the history of archaeology, up to the publishing of this article) was a purposeful and avoidable tragedy. If we are to talk about the conditions of human life and civilization, we should aspire to do one better than the example of your intellectually-honest historian, and affirm that we simply don't know, not that we could not have.

[askvictor]

Couldn't the Coriolis effect basically keep it mostly to the Northern hemisphere? There would be secondary effects to the Southern hemisphere due to cooling in the North (e.g. ocean and atmospheric currents), but depending on where the volcano was, the direct cooling might have been localised.

[gcanyon]

Trees in North America, at least, also reflect this effect -- their rings in these years are extremely narrow, showing poor growing conditions.