Assessing the Impact of Rapid Climate Changes on Culture in the Prehistoric Southern Levant

What is it about?

Many researchers today argue that past climate events, such as the Younger Dryas or the 8.2 ky Event, triggered major cultural shifts in history and prehistory. We review the evidence for the climate changes of the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene in SW Asia to contextualize this problem and then use large numbers of radiocarbon dates, associated with various "cultures" and periods in the region, to assess several hypotheses about the relationships between climate changes and cultural events. In at least some cases, events that have been attributed to climate events apparently occurred before the climate event, making the hypothesis that it was triggered by climate change in those instances highly improbable. For example, it seems clear that the "collapse" of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlements preceded the 8.2 ky Event that supposedly caused the collapse by at least several centuries. The article also points out that we can expect climate changes and cultural changes to co-occur significantly often just by chance, so that the mere coincidence of these evidence does not constitute adequate evidence for a causal relationship. The paper ends with some suggestions about how more nuanced research on climate-culture influences could be more productive.

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Why is it important?

As today's Global Warming has heightened interest in the past impacts of climate change on human culture and economy, it is important to get this right and not depend only on "shopping around" for archaeological events that appear to be coincident with major climate change events. Obviously, something was always happening somewhere when these climate changes occurred. It is necessary instead to investigate the proximate influences of climate change, such as changes in the distributions of food resources, and whether shifts in food production or gathering occurred in places most vulnerable to those specific resource shortages, and in the way predicted by the hypothesis.