The paleoclimatic data — the climate reconstruction from sediment cores and other proxies — provides a different kind of dating.

The drought conditions documented in eastern Mediterranean sediment records are dated through their own independent chronological frameworks, and the overlap between the documented drought conditions and the conventional historical dates for the Bronze Age Collapse is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the connection between the two phenomena.

The convergence of radiocarbon dates, Egyptian historical chronology, and paleoclimatic data on the same half-century provides a high level of confidence that the Bronze Age Collapse was a real, rapid, and widespread phenomenon that occurred within a narrow time window.

This convergence also helps establish that the drought documented in the paleoclimatic record was contemporaneous with the other evidence for the collapse — it was not a hundred years earlier or later, but happening at the same time as the destructions recorded in the archaeological and textual evidence.