Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos Review

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Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos ReviewAt first I thought that "Climate Change in Prehistory" was too academic and stuffed with dry facts for the non-specialist reader. I changed my mind by the end.
There are certainly lots of facts and technical jargon, but these are enlivened by occasional gems of dry humour. The author has also struck a good balance with technical jargon.
The book is easy to read, although it is not a "popular" account by any means.
The author handles controversial topics well: such as the date of human occupation of the Amercas and the extinction of megafauna in Australia and the Americas. He presents the relevant research (including the occasional crackpot theory) and indicates where consensus or controversy exist.
Readers who want to dig deeper into specific issues have plenty of references and an excellent bibliography to get them started.
The book covers a surprisingly wide range of topics. For example, the effects of changing diets (meat vs carbohydrates) as humans changed from being hunter-gatherers to farmers is
described. The author seems to come to an implicit conclusion in relation to modern diets, but I won't give the game away by revealing it here.
Ancient history is generally taught as starting with the Egyptians and Mesopotamian civilisations, so most students have never been exposed to descriptions of what came before the
evolution of large, settled societies - probably because little beyond conjecture was known until quite recently.
Books such as "Climate Change in Prehistory" show how much we have learned about climate in pre-history in recent decades - and how much a study of the remote past can illuminate current
climate debates.
I was struck by how well Burroughs integrates information from a remarkably wide range of data into his book - ice cores, linguistics, pollen studies, oceanic sediments, tree rings to name just a few.
Readers new to the subject, or who are looking for a less-technical account, might be better off reading "The Long Summer" (Fagan) and "The Little Ice Age" (Grove). These are both excellent introductions to climate and its effects on humans since the last ice age.
"Climate Change in Prehistory" is an excellent book for readers who want to know the latest thinking about how climate has varied and affected humans since the last ice age.
Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos OverviewHow did humankind deal with the extreme challenges of the last Ice Age? How have the relatively benign post-Ice Age conditions affected the evolution and spread of humanity across the globe? By setting our genetic history in the context of climate change during prehistory, the origin of many features of our modern world are identified and presented in this illuminating book. It reviews the aspects of our physiology and intellectual development that have been influenced by climatic factors, and how features of our lives - diet, language and the domestication of animals - are also the product of the climate in which we evolved. In short: climate change in prehistory has in many ways made us what we are today. Climate Change in Prehistory weaves together studies of the climate with anthropological, archaeological and historical studies, and will fascinate all those interested in the effects of climate on human development and history.

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The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization Review

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The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization Review_The Long Summer_ by Brian Fagan is in essence a follow up of his excellent earlier work, _The Little Ice Age_, a book that explored the effect of a particular climatic episode on European civilization between the years 1300 and 1850. Fagan expanded his focus greatly in _The Long Summer_ as in this work he analyzed the effects of various climatic events since 18,000 B.C. on the course of Stone Age life, early farming societies, and the evolution of civilizations in Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Americas, covering climatically-influenced human history from the settlement of the Americas to the origins of the Sumerians to the conquest of Gaul by Rome (which was fascinating) through the end of the Mayan and Tiwanaku civilizations (in Central and South America respectively). As in _The Little Ice Age_, Fagan dismissed both those who discounted the role climatic change had played in transforming human societies and those who believed in environmental determinism (the notion that climate change was the primary cause of major developments in human civilization).
Fagan provided many examples of climatic change affecting human history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change - and resulting alteration in the ecology of the region - lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally more dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes included increased mobility - and the end of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer attached to certain areas - and the development of the bow and arrow, much more effective in dense forest against solitary, skittish prey.
While Europeans adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans became dependent upon a relatively moist area of oak and pistachio forests that extended from modern Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not developing agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but rather relied on wild plants, they nevertheless developed some of the early signs of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and other tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they collected each year, supplemented by wild grass seeds and wild gazelles.
While the development of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass stands was a response to climatic and ecological changes brought on by the end of the Ice Age, their eventual end was also largely brought upon by the onset of a series of intense droughts thanks to a remarkable and seemingly distant event around 11,000 B.C.; the draining of the immense Lake Agassiz, a huge meltwater lake that lapped the retreating Laurentide ice sheet for 1,100 km in modern day Canada and the U.S. The lake rose so much that it eventually burst its banks and flooded into what is now Lake Superior and then onto to the Labrador Sea. So much Agassiz meltwater floated atop the dense, salty Gulf Stream that for ten centuries that conveyor of warm, moist air to Europe ceased, among other things plunging southwestern Asia into a thousand year drought. This drought eliminated the groves that the Kebarans depended upon, ending their prehistoric society, though not before the first experiments with cultivating wild grasses. Eventually villages arose that existed primarily dependent and then completely dependent upon cereal agriculture, on grain crops planted and harvested by the people themselves. In such places as Abu Hureyra in modern Syria full-fledged farming arose by 9500 B.C. as a response to drought, to the end of the oak-pistachio belt and the decline of game.
Just as drought lead to early experiments with pre-agricultural communities and then to the actual cultivation of grains, it may have also lead to the domestication of wild goats and sheep in southwestern Asia and of cattle in what would become the Sahara Desert. The arid conditions for instance in southwestern Asia between 11,000 and 9500 B.C. lead to a concentration of game and of humans around the increasingly few permanent water sources, an event that would allow hunters to intimately know individual herds, even individual animals, allowing for these ancient humans to learn how to control the few key members of herds, to selectively cull undesirable members to change the characteristics of that herd's offspring, and how to eventually capture and pen some or all of the herd for later consumption.
It was amazing to me how different the climate and terrain of ancient man truly was. Those who discount the effects of climatic change upon human history should consider how different the world of 6200 BC was. In this year - the time of the famed flat-roofed settlement of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey - farmers lived on the shores of the vast, brackish Euxine Lake to the north of the Anatolian plateau (what would become the Black Sea) and the Laurentide glacier was still retreating in northern Canada. In this year (more or less) began what has been called the Mini Ice Age as vast amounts of Laurentide meltwater suppressed the Gulf Stream, plunged Europe into colder and drier conditions, produced a profound drought in the Mediterranean, and caused ocean waters to rise so that Britain was finally severed from the continent.
Also quite interesting were the several prehistoric societies Fagan touched upon, such as the Kebarans, the `Ubaid people of 5800 B.C. southern Mesopotamia (they predate the Sumerians), the Linearbandkeramik communities of 5600 B.C. Europe, and the early fifth millennium B.C. Badarians of the Nile Valley, groups I was completely unfamiliar with.
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El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker Review

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El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker ReviewNash brings a complex subject to life through stories of the maverick, and occasionally ridiculed, scientists who hunted El Nino over the centuries. She has a delicate touch and paints vivid images of El Nino's glory and its fury, effortlessly explaining seemingly impenetrable science to make it relevant and, more importantly, interesting to the lay reader. Nash has a journalist's way of getting to the point, so there's nothing extraneous is this tightly written narrative. If you liked "Longitude", "Cod", or "Guns, Germs & Steel", or you're simply a fan of the Weather Channel, "El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker" is one you don't want to miss.El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker Overview

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