Origins of human culture linked to rapid climate change

22 May 2013

In an article published yesterday in Nature Communications, EARTH's Dr Martin Ziegler, Ms Margit Simon, Prof Ian Hall, and Dr Stephen Barker, with colleagues from the National History Museum in London and the University of Barcelona, offer evidence that early modern human behaviour and settlement patterns were tightly coupled to climate-driven changes in environmental conditions.

Reconstructing terrestrial climate variability over the last 100,000 years from a marine sediment core taken off the coast of South Africa, the research team compared occurrences of wetter, humid, more favourable climatic conditions with the archaeological record. The correlation they found surprised them.

As Dr Ziegler explained, "We found that South Africa experienced rapid climate transitions toward wetter conditions at times when the Northern Hemisphere experienced extremely cold conditions."

Professor Hall commented, "When the timing of these rapidly occurring wet pulses was compared with the archaeological datasets, we found remarkable coincidences. The occurrence of several major Middle Stone Age industries fell tightly together with the onset of periods with increased rainfall. Similarly, the disappearance of the industries appears to coincide with the transition to drier climatic conditions."

To read more, you can find the Cardiff University press release covering this exciting work here.