THE DECLINE OF NORTH AFRICA SINCE THE ROMAN OCCUPATION: CLIMATIC OR HUMAN?

The study of climatic change is a fascinating and elusive exercise. Especially as the record of earth history begins to merge with the beginnings of human civilization, profoundly significant questions hinge on the dynamic relationship between a changing physical environment and the adaptive qualities of early man and his heirs. It has been suggested from more than one field of enquiry that climatic change was art important factor in the first dispersion of the human progenitor from the deforested plains of central Asia, and that vagaries of climate have ever since exercised a controlling influence on the nature and location of civilizations which man at different periods has established.