Roughly 4000 years after the last glacial period, hunter-gatherers faced another bout of sudden climate change that forced them to rapidly adapt to a much colder world.
While not as frigid or long-lasting as the final stages of the last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, the 8.2 ka cooling event still caused temperatures to plummet by as much as 6掳C (10.8掳F) within decades. At the same time, a land mass the size of Scotland broke away from the Norwegian continental shelf, triggering the powerful Storegga tsunami, which delivered the final blow to Britain鈥檚 separation from Europe.
Through it all, people across the northern hemisphere survived, some by packing up and moving, others by sticking it out, says at the University of Oxford. 鈥淭hese people weren鈥檛 passive victims, they adapted quickly.鈥�
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快猫短视频s have already studied how the 8.2 ka event affected people across the northern hemisphere, but most of this research has been regional. To take a broader view, Schulting and his colleagues compared archaeological and environmental records between north-western Europe and southern Siberia.
The archaeological records included large hunter-gatherer cemeteries and nearly 300 radiocarbon-dated human and animal remains from the Baikal region in south-east Siberia alone. They combined this with high-resolution environmental records, such as pollen and charcoal preserved in lake sediments, which reveal past shifts in vegetation, climate and fire activity with decade-level precision.
The results show that people adapted to the 8.2 ka cold snap in markedly different ways. In Norway鈥檚 Oslo fjord, for example, the number of settlements increased. This suggests that coastal communities may have thrived by eating fish, seals and shellfish, which remained stable as the climate turned.
Likewise, at Lake Baikal, similar aquatic resources may have buffered local populations 鈥� so well, in fact, that archaeologists have found almost no trace of a human response to the 8.2ka event.
But around Lake Onega in north-west Russia, there was a surge in cemetery use that wasn鈥檛 linked to premature deaths or mass mortality, which suggests that local hunter-gatherers clustered here during the chill, probably drawn by reliable supplies of fish and elk. Meanwhile, on the west coast of Scotland, people appeared to step away from their coastal fishing lifestyle, possibly retreating inland to ride out the cold.
The 8.2 ka event offers an important 鈥渨orst-case scenario鈥� model for understanding abrupt climate shifts and demonstrating how global warming can change ocean currents and lead to major cold snaps, says at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
A collapse of the Gulf Stream today could lead to a similar outcome, he says. 鈥淚n the same way as 8200 years ago, humans today will also need to find ways to adapt to the resulting crisis.鈥�
at Ghent University in Belgium finds the team鈥檚 region-to-region comparisons 鈥渆specially valuable鈥�, both historically and today. 鈥淲e know from modern climate change that environmental impacts vary dramatically from one region to another,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his study makes it clear the same was true in the past.鈥�
The findings don鈥檛 just reveal how people responded to climate change historically, they also show how different their options were compared with ours, says Schulting. 鈥淧eople don鈥檛 really care if it鈥檚 1 or 2 degrees warmer or colder 鈥� until it affects the rainfall patterns, the migrations of animals, the kinds of plants that are available,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e a hunter-gatherer and your environment suddenly turns hostile, you could just walk away, but that鈥檚 much harder to do when you鈥檝e got roads, cities and supply chains. That kind of mobility is a luxury we don鈥檛 have anymore.鈥�
Quaternary Environments and Humans
