Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Scholars used China’s “oracle bones” to help decipher the collapse of the Shang dynasty. Combined with paleoclimate reconstructions, the team found an intense increase in typhoon activity helped shift the cultural makeup of inland China roughly 3,000 years ago. One of the world’s oldest surviving collections of writing, scratched into ‘oracle bones’ by Shang dynasty chroniclers more than three millennia ago, is finally giving up its secrets. Sorting through the oracle bones was a key undertaking of the project. “Intensified typhoon activities exerted unexpected disastrous influences in inland China during the Bronze Age.”