The Ancient Climate Crisis

Modern times aren't the first time that humanity has grappled with climate change. It won't be the last, either.

Regular – and irregular – fluctuations in global temps are accepted by scientists. This kind of change has happened before and it’ll happen again. No amount of pseudo-scientific wishcraft can alter that.

To explore long-term human responses to environmental change in a temperate region, where the relationship between humans and environmental change may not be immediately evident, we integrate newly available and detailed environmental and archaeological records from the northeastern United States that span the initial human settlement of the region 13.5 kyr BP to the arrival of Europeans 0.5 kyr BP (thousand calendar years before present). Our analysis identifies temporal correspondence between several key cultural transitions, fluctuations in human population, and climate-driven changes in terrestrial ecosystems, generating new insights into environmental factors that influenced cultural change in North American prehistory. (Munoz et al)

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That’s from the abstract of a recent PNAS publication. Annalee Newitz gets credit for flagging this. It’s some thoughts about how ancient humans grappled with their climate crisis: the thawing of an ice age.

Essentially, these changes sparked the creation of new technologies, particularly when old kinds of food became unavailable. One shift in the environment actually led to the development of maize farming, for example. Write the authors of the study, “changes in forest composition altered the distribution, availability, and predictability of food resources which triggered technological adjustments manifested in the archaeological record.” In other words, changes in the environment reliably lead to a cascade effect that changes both the population size and human technological development. (Newitz)

In this read, shifting our diets due to change counts as a technological shift. Now, I’m not going to pretend I understand the actual PNAS article. It’s for specialists well versed in the appropriate math and statistical methods.

However, the accompanying graphic does a pretty good job of portraying the changes in some elements of our ecology. You get a pretty good impression of the structure of the change. I’ll leave it to the pros to tease out the points of digression and debate, but it’s sure interesting.

About Matt Warren

I'm a husband, father, gamer, and restless quasi-intellectual. My interests include reading, gaming, and juggling knives while blindfolded and barrel-running down a steep hill.