Scientists decoded 3,000-year-old “oracle bones” – and found evidence of an ancient catastrophe

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Scientists used China’s “oracle bones” to decipher the collapse of the Shang Dynasty.
• Combined with paleoclimate reconstructions, the team found that a sharp increase in typhoon activity about 3,000 years ago helped change the cultural composition of inland China.
• The modeling used by the experts shows that climate activity may have played a crucial role in cultural changes in ancient China.

One of the oldest surviving collections of writings in the world, carved into “oracle bones” by Shang Dynasty chroniclers more than three millennia ago, is finally revealing its secrets. Using a powerful combination of artificial intelligence and physics-based modeling, scientists have decoded a startling message from the deep past: intensification Typhoon activity could have caused an entire ancient world to collapse.

In a study published in the diary Scientific advancesResearchers examined how extreme climate events – in this case…