Climate change and hunter gatherers in Ireland:

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Graeme Warren
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Rodrigue Batumike ◽  
Franklin Bulonvu ◽  
Gérard Imani ◽  
Desiré Akonkwa ◽  
Aimable Gahigi ◽  
...  

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joaquim Fort ◽  
Toni Pujol ◽  
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

The wave-of-advance model has been previously applied to Neolithic human range expansions, yielding good agreement to the speeds inferred from archaeological data. Here, we apply it for the first time to Palaeolithic human expansions by using reproduction and mobility parameters appropriate to hunter-gatherers (instead of the corresponding values for preindustrial farmers). The order of magnitude of the predicted speed is in agreement with that implied by the AMS radiocarbon dating of the lateglacial human recolonization of northern Europe (14.2–12.5 kyr bp). We argue that this makes it implausible for climate change to have limited the speed of the recolonization front. It is pointed out that a similar value for the speed can be tentatively inferred from the archaeological data on the expansion of modern humans into the Levant and Europe (42–36 kyr bp).


Geology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Schultz ◽  
R. Scott Harris ◽  
Sebastián Perroud ◽  
Nicolas Blanco ◽  
Andrew J. Tomlinson

Twisted and folded silicate glasses (up to 50 cm across) concentrated in certain areas across the Atacama Desert near Pica (northern Chile) indicate nearly simultaneous (seconds to minutes) intense airbursts close to Earth’s surface near the end of the Pleistocene. The evidence includes mineral decompositions that require ultrahigh temperatures, dynamic modes of emplacement for the glasses, and entrained meteoritic dust. Thousands of identical meteoritic grains trapped in these glasses show compositions and assemblages that resemble those found exclusively in comets and CI group primitive chondrites. Combined with the broad distribution of the glasses, the Pica glasses provide the first clear evidence for a cometary body (or bodies) exploding at a low altitude. This occurred soon after the arrival of proto-Archaic hunter-gatherers and around the time of rapid climate change in the Southern Hemisphere.


Author(s):  
Alan N. Williams

In a recent article, I (and my colleagues) present models of population change for key regions across Australia over the last 35,000 years. We use these models to test an archaeological method (the use of numbers of radiocarbon dates as an indicator of human behaviour), explore the relationship of Aboriginal people and climate change, and to provide a status update for Australian archaeological research. We find that the archaeological technique is reliable, albeit with well-documented caveats that the user needs to be aware of. We find a close relationship between Aboriginal population and climate change for much of the last 35,000 years, with increasing divergence of the records in the last 6,000 years as numbers of people increase and techniques were developed to survive environmental shifts. We identify key areas of future research for the Australian archaeological community, including the need to fill spatial gaps across parts of the continent, and to focus on key temporal periods where significant change in society appears evident.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 810-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Blockley ◽  
Ian Candy ◽  
Ian Matthews ◽  
Pete Langdon ◽  
Cath Langdon ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Roslyn Gleadow ◽  
Jim Hanan ◽  
Alan Dorin

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Millington ◽  
Peter M. Cox ◽  
Jonathan R. Moore ◽  
Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).


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