Earthquake caused the end of Sanxingdui?

[Duncan Head]

An earthquake nearly 3,000 years ago may be the culprit in the mysterious disappearance of one of China's ancient civilizations, new research suggests.

The massive temblor may have caused catastrophic landslides, damming up the Sanxingdui culture's main water source and diverting it to a new location.

That, in turn, may have spurred the ancient Chinese culture to move closer to the new river flow, study co-author Niannian Fan, a river sciences researcher at Tsinghua University in Chengdu, China, said Dec. 18 at the 47th annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Suggestion reported at http://www.livescience.com/49247-chinese-civilization-disappearance-explained.html

[Dave Beatty]

This is an elegant solution to many of the seeming mysteries surrounding this pre-Shang culture, from the near-total absence of any mention of it in what is otherwise a continuous written record of Chinese culture, to the sudden appearance of sophisticated bronze metallurgy around 2000 BC at Ban Chiang, Thailand and its apparent derivation from a Central Asian steppe tradition ("Seima–Turbino phenomenon") to the sudden appearance in the Shang period Central Plain of bronze weapons and relatively highly developed religious, warfare and agricultural concepts.

Further cross-discipline examination of the evidence will no doubt yield further results.