An international team of scientists uncovered several specimens of ancient graffiti inside a cave in China that describe harrowing events in the history of the area including conflict, drought and instances of cannibalism that span for 500 years.
The researchers, led by experts from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, examined the inscriptions found in a cave located in China's central region.
By combining data from these texts with those collected through a chemical analysis of the cave's stalagmites, the team was able to create a detailed picture of how widespread droughts affect societies over a period of time. It marks the first instance where an in situ comparison was conducted in order to analyze geographical and historical records.
The findings of the study, featured in the Scientific Reports journal, also describe a potentially significant reduction in the amount of rainfall in the area in the coming years, which underlies the importance of initiating contingency programs that could help societies of the world deal with more commonly occurring droughts.
The ancient Chinese texts were discovered on the walls of Dayu Cave located in the country's Qinling Mountains. The writings describe the events surrounding seven droughts that occurred in the region from 1520 to 1920.
The local climate around the Dayu Cave is dominated by China's summer monsoon, which is characterized by massive rainfall amounting to about 70 percent of entire rain in the country in over a few months' time. The arrival of the monsoon rains in the country, as well as its duration, often causes a significant impact on central China's ecosystem.
Cambridge researcher Dr. Sebastian Breitenbach said that aside from the obvious effects of droughts, these occurrences have also been connected to the demise of cultures where human populations lose access to sufficient water supply from which conflicts and hardships often arise.
Breitenbach explained that in the past ten years, various records retrieved from lakes and caves have pointed to a potential link between changes in the climate and the eventual downfall of several dynasties in China during the past 1,800 years, including that of the Yuan, Ming and Tang dynasties.
The researchers are now using data collected from these ancient texts as well as that of stalagmites in the Dayu Cave to create a scientific model that can help identify future precipitation in central China and predict possible droughts.
In their analysis, they found that the ongoing climate change could potentially exacerbate the effects of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, which could in turn cause more serious and widespread droughts in the region in the future.
