Soil loss—especially the physical loss or biological impoverishment, hence carbon depletion, of humus—is currently far outpacing soil and humus formation and enrichment worldwide. This net loss of soil carbon has contributed about

It now seems that such a disastrous drought may have affected northern Italy in the Bronze Age. There are indications that the Terramare culture, which had flourished in the Po delta/plain in northern Italy since the seventeenth century BC, suddenly collapsed around 1200 BC. Kristian Kristiansen, a highly regarded scholar of Bronze Age Europe, note