TY - JOUR
T1 - The resilience of postglacial hunter-gatherers to abrupt climate change
AU - Blockley, Simon
AU - Candy, Ian
AU - Matthews, Ian
AU - Langdon, Pete
AU - Langdon, Cath
AU - Palmer, Adrian
AU - Lincoln, Paul
AU - Abrook, Ashley
AU - Taylor, Barry
AU - Conneller, Chantal
AU - Bayliss, Alex
AU - Macleod, Alison
AU - Deeprose, L.
AU - Darvill, Christopher
AU - Kearney, R.
AU - Beavan, Nancy
AU - Staff, Richard
AU - Bamforth, Michael
AU - Taylor, Maisie
AU - Milner, Nicky
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the landowners of Star Carr, English Heritage/Historic England, and Natural England for granting permission to excavate. N.M. received funding for this from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 283938, British Academy grants SG-44333, SG-47081 and SG-50217, English Heritage/Historic England grants 5536, 6064, 6793 and 6796, and Historic England also contributed directly towards the costs of the radiocarbon dating of the site, Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/ I015191/1, and the Vale of Pickering Research Trust. R.S. is supported by an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2015-396). A.A. is supported by the Natural Environment Research Council's London Doctoral Training Partnership.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/3/26
Y1 - 2018/3/26
N2 - Understanding the resilience of early societies to climate change is an essential part of exploring the environmental sensitivity of human populations. There is significant interest in the role of abrupt climate events as a driver of early Holocene human activity, but there are very few well-dated records directly compared with local climate archives. Here, we present evidence from the internationally important Mesolithic site of Star Carr showing occupation during the early Holocene, which is directly compared with a high-resolution palaeoclimate record from neighbouring lake beds. We show that—once established—there was intensive human activity at the site for several hundred years when the community was subject to multiple, severe, abrupt climate events that impacted air temperatures, the landscape and the ecosystem of the region. However, these results show that occupation and activity at the site persisted regardless of the environmental stresses experienced by this society. The Star Carr population displayed a high level of resilience to climate change, suggesting that postglacial populations were not necessarily held hostage to the flickering switch of climate change. Instead, we show that local, intrinsic changes in the wetland environment were more significant in determining human activity than the large-scale abrupt early Holocene climate events.
AB - Understanding the resilience of early societies to climate change is an essential part of exploring the environmental sensitivity of human populations. There is significant interest in the role of abrupt climate events as a driver of early Holocene human activity, but there are very few well-dated records directly compared with local climate archives. Here, we present evidence from the internationally important Mesolithic site of Star Carr showing occupation during the early Holocene, which is directly compared with a high-resolution palaeoclimate record from neighbouring lake beds. We show that—once established—there was intensive human activity at the site for several hundred years when the community was subject to multiple, severe, abrupt climate events that impacted air temperatures, the landscape and the ecosystem of the region. However, these results show that occupation and activity at the site persisted regardless of the environmental stresses experienced by this society. The Star Carr population displayed a high level of resilience to climate change, suggesting that postglacial populations were not necessarily held hostage to the flickering switch of climate change. Instead, we show that local, intrinsic changes in the wetland environment were more significant in determining human activity than the large-scale abrupt early Holocene climate events.
U2 - 10.1038/s41559-018-0508-4
DO - 10.1038/s41559-018-0508-4
M3 - Article
VL - 2
SP - 810
EP - 818
JO - Nature Ecology & Evolution
JF - Nature Ecology & Evolution
SN - 2397-334X
IS - 5
ER -