What is it about?
This study reconstructs climate and environmental changes in the eastern Fertile Crescent between 18,000 and 7,500 years ago. It uses geochemical information preserved in a stalagmite collected from a cave in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The time interval is a key period that spans the transition from the last Ice Age to the early Holocene. The authors identified how rainfall, temperature, and dust input changed over the course of the deglaciation. Changes in local rainfall were in lock step with rapid temperature shifts recorded in Greenland ice cores. During the Bølling–Allerød, which was the first episode of abrupt warming, the climate became wetter but was highly variable at the multidecadal scale. This warming was reversed during the Younger Dryas, which was a colder, drier, and dustier time compared to the Bølling–Allerød. This environmental sequence overlaps with major cultural developments in the region, including the transition from mobile Epipaleolithic groups to the first early Neolithic communities. Along with existing paleoenvironmental studies, it also defines environmental gradients across the Fertile Crescent, thus providing a framework for understanding different cultural trajectories and pathways toward sedentism and the emergence of agriculture in the region.
Featured Image
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The Fertile Crescent is the key region of the Neolithic revolution, when early human settlements, plant cultivation and herding first appeared in human history. Yet until now, high-resolution, well-dated paleoclimate records from its eastern sector were not available to explain how climate may have influenced local cultural trajectories. The study fills this gap by showing how rapid climate shifts affected rainfall and environmental conditions in the Zagros foothills. Together with the intrinsic heterogeneity of this environment, these changes shaped the availability and distribution of resources, influencing the settlement choices of local Epipaleolithic communities, which maintained more mobile strategies compared to groups in the western sector. The close alignment of the new record with Greenland temperatures also improves our understanding of how hemispheric and global climate dynamics cascaded into regional impacts.
Perspectives
This stalagmite record is exciting because it finally provides the temporal resolution needed to connect specific cultural phases with equally specific environmental changes in the eastern Fertile Crescent. This region has long been recognized as crucial for early agriculture, yet until now it lacked a robust climate timeline with which to contextualize the regional archaeology. Most compelling is that the data reveal both stability and rapid change: while human groups were highly flexible and resilient, climatic variability (or lack thereof) at multidecadal to centennial scales likely shaped how they used the landscape, moved across it, and adapted their subsistence strategies. Different communities followed distinct cultural trajectories in response to their local environments — yet these diverse pathways ultimately contributed to the broader process of Neolithization across the Fertile Crescent. This work highlights how much detail lies hidden in cave archives, and how integrating geoscience and archaeology can reshape our understanding of the earliest farming societies.
Eleonora Regattieri
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A speleothem record from the Fertile Crescent covering the last deglaciation better contextualizes neolithization, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2502092122.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
