How archaeology can offer a blueprint for adapting to climate change

How does climate change affect the way humans organize themselves? How did he have shaped the course of human evolution? An international team of scientists, including scientists from the University of Montreal, thinks that the key to answering these questions is to pay more attention to the archaeological file.

Archeology, they say, can help fill the gap between natural and social processes – offer a plan for integrative models that explore how climate change has an impact on human systems.

In an article published in Nature communicationsResearchers argue that although cultural systems play an important role in training interactions between humans and the environment, they are poorly integrated into analytical models (so -called earth systems) used today by climatologists.

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

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

Directed by anthropologist Udem Ariane Burke, the new document is co-written by a team of nine archaeologists, physical anthropologists, geographers and scientists of the earth based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, including the teachers of Udem Timothée Poisot and Michelle Drapeau.

‘A workflow for model makers’

“What we propose is a workflow for the modelers that they can use to integrate human systems into earth systems models,” explains Burke, who directs the research group on the dispersions of hominin and the laboratory of eco -cornphology and Udem paleoanthropology.

“We use environmental and archaeological data as an entry for the creation of housing skills, also called species distribution models, which describe the structure of the landscape in which human groups interacted with each other and the environment in the past,” she said.

“Then we use the theory of cultural evolution to predict the models of cultural change which can be tested using archaeological archives, which allows us to study the impact of climate change passed on cultural evolution via a landscape approach,” she said.

“The next step will be to use more detailed and qualitative information on the human behavior of archaeological, historical and ethnographic recordings to produce more complete models of human-environment interactions in climate change conditions.”

Throughout history, she and her colleagues note that people of different cultures have found ways to adapt, with variable success, climate change – by modifying the resources to be exploited or cultivated to develop, for example.

The archeology of climate change, an emerging field of climate science, uses excavation data to study how humans have interacted with their environment during past climate change events such as sudden warming which followed the last glacial period, more than 10,000 years ago.

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