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