Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: Climate and society
Authored by Stefani A Crabtree, Jade A d'Alpoim Guedes, R Kyle Bocinsky, Timothy A Kohler
Date Published: 2016
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1616188113
Sponsors:
United States National Science Foundation (NSF)
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
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Abstract
By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that
are often much greater than those experienced in the instrumental
record, archaeology provides our only deep-time laboratory for
highlighting the circumstances under which humans managed or failed to
find to adaptive solutions to changing climate, not just over a few
generations but over the longue duree. Patterning between
climate-mediated environmental change and change in human societies has, however, been murky because of low spatial and temporal resolution in
available datasets, and because of failure to model the effects of
climate change on local resources important to human societies. In this
paper we review recent advances in computational modeling that, in
conjunction with improving data, address these limitations. These
advances include network analysis, niche and species distribution
modeling, and agent-based modeling. These studies demonstrate the
utility of deep-time modeling for calibrating our understanding of how
climate is influencing societies today and may in the future.
Tags
Holocene
North-america
Food webs
Land-cover
Quantitative reconstructions
Tibetan plateau
Central-europe
Collapse
Pleistocene
History