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How archaeology can offer a blueprint for adapting to climate change

How does climate change affect the way humans organize themselves? How has it shaped the course of human evolution? An international team of scientists, including scientists from the Université de Montréal, think the key to answering those questions is to pay more attention to the archaeological record.

Archaeology, they say, can help bridge the gap between natural and social processes—offering a blueprint for integrative models that explore how climate change impacts human systems.

In a paper in Nature Communications, the researchers argue that although cultural systems play an important role in shaping interactions between humans and the environment, they're poorly integrated into the analytical models (so-called Earth-systems models) used today by climate scientists.

To properly study how natural and anthropogenic processes interact as the climate changes, the scientists suggest using concepts drawn from climate science and evolutionary anthropology to focus on how climate-driven transformations of landscapes change the way human society is structured.

The impact of these environmental transformations on people can be felt in several areas: in changing demographics, the reorganization of social networks and ultimately, cultural change, the scientists say.

Led by UdeM anthropologist Ariane Burke, the new paper is co-authored by a team of nine archaeologists, physical anthropologists, geographers and Earth scientists based in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France, including UdeM professors Timothée Poisot and Michelle Drapeau.

'A workflow for modelers'

"What we're proposing is a workflow for modelers that they can use to integrate human systems into Earth-systems models," explains Burke, who runs the Hominin Dispersals Research Group and UdeM's Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory.

"We use environmental and archaeological data as input for creating habitat suitability models, also known as species distribution models, that describe the structure of the landscape within which human groups interacted with each other and the environment in the past," she said.

"Then we use cultural evolution theory to predict patterns of cultural change that can be tested using the archaeological record, and this allows us to study the impact of past climate change on cultural evolution via a landscape approach," she said.

"The next step will be to use more detailed, qualitative information about human behavior from archaeological, historical and ethnographic records to produce more complete models of human-environment interactions under conditions of climate change."

Throughout history, she and her colleagues note, people of different cultures have found ways to adapt, with varying success, to climate change—by changing what resources to exploit or crops to grow, for instance.

The archaeology of climate change, an emerging field of climate science, uses data from digs to study how humans interacted with their environment during past climate-change events such as the sudden warming that followed the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

Burke and her colleagues aim to identify the tipping points in climate history that may have prompted people to reorganize their societies to survive. In that respect, cultural diversity, a source of human resilience in the past, is just as important today as a bulwark against global warming, they say.