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Stones Forum >> Indigenous peoples adapt to climate change? - past and present
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Indigenous peoples adapt to climate change? - past and present |
bat400
Joined:
10-04-2006
Messages: 1334
from South Central Indiana, US
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|  Posted 12-02-2011 at 20:16
The climate in the Northeastern United States changed drastically more than five times before the first Europeans arrived. A new study suggests that the indigenous people in the area were able to adapt their culture and agriculture accordingly each time one of these changes occurred.
It adds credence to the argument that human ingenuity can trump climate change when the circumstances are right. But for native populations now living in Alaska and the Yukon, who face a similar situation, adaptation may not be so easy.
Most previous studies of the effects of climate change on human life have centered on situations in which human vulnerability was the greatest, such as the drought that probably drove the Anasazi out of their pueblos in the Southeast United States (~1300AD). The new study, (Dec. 6, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,) is one of the first to measure the transformation in a temperate climate and on a broader scope.
Samuel Munoz, a doctoral student (University of Wisconsin-Madison,) and geologist Konrad Gajewski (University of Ottawa) looked at samples of sedimentary pollen and charcoal collected between Maine and Pennsylvania. This gave them a historical record of temperatures, vegetation patterns and fire history in the area. They matched that with data on the cultures of people inhabiting this area from the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database, a repository of more than 35,000 archeological and paleontological radiocarbon dates. The period they measured ranged from the time humans first settled the region 13,500 years ago to the first European-settled colonies 500 years ago.
Gajewski, Munoz and their colleague Matthew Peros compared the known changes in climate to the cultural time periods anthropologists define as Paleoindian, Archaic and Woodland. Every change in the climate, they discovered, occurred at the same time as a change in the culture. The tools the natives used, the crops they grew, the animals they hunted all changed with the circumstances.
Some of the changes were abrupt, some more gradual, but largely "every cultural transition corresponds to a major transition in the climate and vegetation of the region," the researchers wrote. When climate change altered food resources for preagricultural American Indians, they shifted strategy, and sometimes population size.
Similar changes are now happening in Alaska and the Yukon, where the Inuits and American Indians live.
For more, see the link below.
Thanks to coldrum for the link: physorg.com
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2011-02-12 20:20 ]
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bat400
Joined:
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Messages: 1334
from South Central Indiana, US
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| Posted 12-02-2011 at 20:32
A similar article from the Boston Globe online. Thanks to coldrum.
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