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Free keywords:
biomarkers, botanical remains, climate change, human–environment interactions, ocean and lake sediments, stable isotopes
Abstract:
Adapting to climatic and environmental change is a defining human characteristic, as is our species' global impact on land and life. Although today we can monitor climatic change and our influence on global ecologies, it has been more challenging to document the impact changing climates and environments had on prehistoric and historic human societies and vice versa. Because we often do not have direct measurements for studying the composition and dynamics of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, or biosphere in the past, we rely on indirect proxies to reconstruct climatological and environmental conditions of relevance to human populations and experiences. Both “off-site” (those from ocean and lake cores, glacial ice, or speleothems) and “on-site” (those collected directly at archaeological sites) proxies are now used to reconstruct the ecological settings in which societies developed, flourished, and struggled. Climate proxies can inform on such parameters as changing air temperatures, precipitation amounts, concentration of atmospheric gases, vegetation communities, or the seasonal intensity of monsoons. When coupled with archaeological data, climate proxies can be used to explore human–environment interactions across the African and Asian continents.
