John D. Grainger - Climate change : an archaeological study : how our prehistoric ancestors responded to global warming

Climate Change: An Archaeological Study

How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Responded to Global Warming

John D Grainger

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright John D Grainger 2020

ISBN 978 1 52678 654 8

eISBN 978 1 52678 655 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52678 656 2

The right of John D Grainger to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Stages of the Ice Age

The Spread of Homo sapiens

Sundaland and Sahul

Early Sites in Australia and New Guinea

East New Guinea and Melanesia

GALLERY I: THE EARLIEST AUSTRALIANS

Effects of the Laki Eruption, 1783

Changes in Sea Level

Changes in Climate and Vegetation

Northern Hemisphere Vegetation Zones

Europe in the Ice Age

Caves in use in Ice Age Europe

The shrinking and division of Sahul

North America in the Ice Age

GALLERY II: EUROPE IN THE ICE AGE

Mammoth Hunters Tent

Meiendorf and Stellmoor

Doggerland

Russia and Ukraine under the ice

Colonisation of Norway

Early Norwegian Ships

Arboreal Colonisation of Europe

The Retreat of the Ice

Beringia

Aleut and Inuit

GALLERY III: SCENES OF MESOLITHIC LIFE IN IBERIA

Ice and Water in Glacial North America

The Shifting Lake Agassiz

Lake Missoula

The Ice-free Corridor

Nenana and Denali Sites in Alaska

Early Sites in North America

Early Sites in South America

Early Sites in Alaska and British Columbia

GALLERY IV: EXTINCT ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA

Eastern North America under the Ice

Japan becomes an island

Mesolithic Shell Mounds

Early fishing in the Gulf

Alexander and Nearchos in the Desert

The Bass Strait Islands

Danish Mesolithic fishermen

A Danish Mesolithic House

A Canoe Burial

Japanese Pottery Decoration

The Periods of Japanese Prehistory

Japanese Shellmound village

The Foragers of Oronsay

Mesolithic India

Mesolithic Sites in the Gangetic Plain

Two Peruvian Early Sites

GALLERY V: MESOLITHIC LIFE IN INDIA

Changes in the Australian North

Sites in the Kakadu

Climate Changes in the Sahara and East Africa

Saharan Climate Fluctuations

Cattle in the Sahara

GALLERY VI: SAHARAN ROCK DRAWINGS

The Fertile Crescent

Ohalo

The First Agriculturalists

Natufian Houses

Early Agriculture in East Asia

Rice at Diaotonghuan Cave

African Domestication

East New Guinea

Kuk

GALLERY VII: THE INVENTION OF AGRICULTURE

G lobal warming, we are told, is a fact. Evidence is produced almost daily to support this theory, large numbers of scientists are corralled into stating that it is happening, the United Nations has weighed in with conferences and reports that it is happening, large numbers of non-governmental agencies are involved creating plenty of jobs for bureaucrats lobbyists and agitators and non-governmental agencies abound, seeking to exert pressure on governments to do something, and go green. And yet it is actually not much more, so far, than a preliminary theory supplemented by projections of future trends, which vary widely with the hysteria of the projector. For the global temperature is still within the range over which it has oscillated for the last ten millennia. The problem is, of course, that the proof of the theory may well be an uninhabitable earth.

At the same time there are many who have disbelieved the prediction from the first. Some of these people have credible reasons for their scepticism. For example, one of the apparently most telling images which proves that the warming is taking place is the reduction in the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean, which is popularly associated with the predicted rise in the sea level but the Arctic ice is frozen sea water, and its melting will not seriously affect the sea level. At times the enthusiasts for global warming are guilty of allowing such facts to go by without correction, imagining that such falsehoods assist their case. The ice caps and glaciers on land, however, are a different matter, for their melting will certainly cause a rise in the sea level. It would help, in considering the issues, if those who did so took a rather longer view than since records began, which is a disingenuous way of implying a long time. In fact, records of climate rarely cover a period longer than the last two centuries; in climatological and geological terms this is the blink of an eye.

We will have to wait and see what actually happens, or rather our descendants will see, especially if we simply wait. Plenty of efforts are going into plans to restrict the warming, even reverse it, largely based on the theory that it is caused by the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This assumption may or may not be correct, and the suggested actions may or may not work. Again there are enthusiasts for solutions which if implemented may well be so drastic as to be worse than the problem. It seems unlikely that we know enough about the Earth, its seas, and its air circulation, to risk fiddling with it any more. And yet the theory of global warming would not be the first scientific theory that proved to be mistaken, but which had the desired corrective effect.

It is worth remembering that diseases were regarded as Acts of God for many centuries, and that when malaria became a scourge it was ascribed to something in the air mal-aria = bad air which, in a (temporarily) convincing scientific theory of a miasma, indicated that stinking refuse and rotting waste should be removed so as to remove the miasma exuding from them, and when this was done, they thereupon ceased to produce the bad air. Later came the germ theory of disease, and this debunked the miasma theory. But the dismissed and disproved theory had, all the same, indicated the right preventative action; removing the stinking refuse really did help to remove a major cause of malaria, at least in the temperate regions of the world.

Therefore, even if global warming really is happening, and even if the over-production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases does not prove to have been the cause, reducing or eliminating the production of these chemicals can only be a good thing, and can only be a worthwhile exercise.