760 natural disasters: Africa may have destroyed a Sumatran civilization: The darkened skies brought about crop failures around the world, causing untold deaths Earthquakes seemed to leap out of the ground at people, wrenching open the earth and causing buildings to fall, yet people could plan to a degree for such events For example, people in the areas of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan developed a building technology that incorporated wood into walls of stone, giving the walls the ability to flex and remain standing during the frequent shocks in the area In Japan construction techniques with wood allowed entire structures to bend during shocks Indeed, in both the Near East and Japan deaths caused by collapsing structures most often occurred when the building contractors cut corners and broke building codes, constructing substandard structures Violent weather was something else people anticipated when building The mobile huts of the nomadic peoples of central and northern Asia were admirably suited to parting violent windstorms around themselves, like boats gliding through water The Inuit of North America similarly made use of building shape to defect the effects of snowstorms In Southeast Asia many cultures built longhouses high on stilts to avoid floodwaters yet with sleek roofs of reeds that sent water from storms out and away from the houses With storms and all other forms of natural disaster, sometimes there was nothing to be done but stay away For instance, during medieval times, Indians tended to avoid settling in the coastal plains that flooded frequently because of monsoons Even the most careful water management could not save the great cities of the Silk Road from a change in climate that dried the land, forcing residents to leave Further, whether the threat was from forest fires or volcanic explosions, people sometimes had to move into harm’s way to find food for foraging or to find fertile land on which to grow food Sometimes there was no escape, whether because of war or geography, and living with drought or avalanche was just something to be endured Africa by Leah A J Cohen The record of natural disasters in medieval Africa is fragmented, and many of the links between climate change, drought, flood, and famine have yet to be uncovered and documented The sources of information regarding these and other natural disasters are pieced together from a variety of sources, including mythology and tradition, archaeological records, the travel documents of Arabian and European explorers, ice and sediment cores, data about sea temperature, and extensive records of Nile River flows This information illustrates that disease epidemics and cycles of drought and flooding were the most commonly documented natural disasters for humans in Africa during this period The occurrence of droughts in East Africa near the start of the medieval period has been linked to a massive volcanic event in Java in 535 The gases that billowed into the atmosphere and spread around the globe reduced sunlight all over the world, which resulted in a sudden drop in temperatures and a reduction in rainfall in many regions The northeastern monsoon that flowed between India and the African coast and traditionally brought seasonal rains to East Africa was much drier than normal It is estimated that these dry conditions lasted two to three years Some historians and scientists have made a link between the extreme dryness that followed the Java eruption and the East African origins of the bubonic plague outbreak that traveled with traders up the Nile and possibly the Red Sea, reaching Egypt by 542 This outbreak then traveled across the Mediterranean and spread throughout Europe It is thought that a dramatic transition from dry to wet conditions, which happened during the recovery from the dry period, created conditions that allowed the resident East African rodent population, on which plague-carrying fleas lived, to explode faster than their natural predators’ populations This meant that the rodents’ habitat expanded quickly and put them in contact with other animals and humans that did not have a natural resistance to the plague The plague outbreak has been blamed for the comparatively sudden switch from agricultural to pastoral livelihoods in eastern Africa Historians theorize that the rapidly expanding population of infected rodents congregated in areas where crops were stored, which resulted in the transfer of disease to farmers more quickly than to herders, who had less contact with the rodents It is also thought that many of the port cities on the eastern coast of Africa were abandoned as a result of this outbreak of plague Aside from the two- to three-year dry spell in the sixth century, many other periods of drought occurred from region to region throughout the African continent Stories of drought are scattered throughout the mythologies of many African cultures from medieval times For example, the fall of the empire of Ghana in the 12th and 13th centuries has been attributed to several factors, one of which was a severe drought that devastated the land and natural-resource base of the empire Furthermore, tradition tells of a severe drought in the empire of Mali prior to its peak in the 13th century that ended because the first king of Mali converted to Islam The exact dates of his rule and the drought are unknown A number of travel, church, and government records suggest a drought in Ethiopia sometime between 1252 and 1274 that caused widespread famine An Arabian travel document re-