Eric Cline | 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

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Recommends dpeck · 2016-05 · on “3600-year-old Swedish Axes Were Made with Copper from Cyprus”

Nice video intro/discussion about the book for anyone interested. I haven't had a chance to read it yet but it is fascinating. [this video]

Recommends Radim · 2016-08 · on “Late Bronze Age Shipwreck Excavation”

Eric Cline, the author of that book, is also an entertaining speaker. I recommend his 1h youtube talk about the bronze age & genesis of "1177 BC": [this video]

Cites dalke · 2016-05 · on “3600-year-old Swedish Axes Were Made with Copper from Cyprus”

I think you mean the somewhat more limited "... used in eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age tools ..." In the video linked to by dpeck, Cline talks about Afghanistan as a tin source at [this video] . He mentions Cornwall and Turkey as two other sources, with "the vast majority" coming from Afghanistan. Cornwall provided a lot of the tin for Europe. A clue that Cline is talking about a regional supply is that he mentioned Cyprus as the source for copper, when NW Europe had other sources, like Great Orme in Wales.

Cites tareqak · 2020-04 · on “New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system”

This issue highlights one of my main fears about a pandemic such as COVID-19: if enough people with the necessary amount of knowledge to maintain necessary infrastructure die without sufficiently and timely trained replacements, then civilization as we know it becomes one more step closer towards total irrecoverable collapse. The prevalence of COBOL and other older programming languages in many parts of the world's critical infrastructure (unemployment claims here, finance, government, defense) means that the average age of someone maintaining these systems tends older. Older people tend to have more health issues. From the summaries of reports I read about COVID-19, the majority of the deat