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The resilience of postglacial hunter-gatherers to abrupt climate change

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Chantal Conneller, Dr Nicola Milner

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Nature Publishing Group, 2018.

For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.


Abstract

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.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Blockley S, Candy I, Matthews I, Langdon P, Langdon C, Palmer A, Lincoln P, Abrook A, Taylor B, Conneller C, Bayliss A, MacLeod A, Deeprose L, Darvill C, Beavan N, Kearney R, Staff R, Bamforth M, Taylor M, Milner N

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Nature Ecology & Evolution

Year: 2018

Volume: 2

Pages: 810-818

Online publication date: 26/03/2018

Acceptance date: 13/02/2018

Date deposited: 10/04/2018

ISSN (electronic): 2397-334X

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0508-4

DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0508-4


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
5536
6793
6796
283938
6064
ECF-2015-396
FP7/2007-2013
NE/I015191/1
SG-47081
SG-44333
SG-50217

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