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This chapter reviews previously published palaeovegetation and independent palaeoclimatic datasets to determine the responses of Amazonian ecosystems to changes in temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations that occurred since the last glacial maximum (LGM), about 21,000 years ago, and it uses this long-term perspective to predict the likely vegetation responses to future climate change. Amazonia remained predominantly forested at the LGM, although savannas expanded at the margins of the basin. The combination of reduced temperatures, precipitation, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations resulted in forests structurally and floristically quite different from those of today. Evergreen rainforest distribution increased during the glacial-Holocene transition due to ameliorating climatic and CO₂ conditions. However, reduced precipitation in the early-mid Holocene (about 8000-3600 years ago) period caused widespread, frequent fires in seasonal southern Amazonia, with increased abundance of drought-tolerant dry forest taxa and savanna in ecotonal areas. Rainforests expanded once again in the late Holocene period as a result of increased precipitation. The plant communities that existed during the early-mid Holocene period may constitute the closest analogues to the kinds of vegetation responses expected from similar increases in temperature and aridity posited for the 21st century.

This chapter explores the dynamics of plant and animal species and species assemblages during the Earth's most recent period of rapid warming to garner insights into the potential consequences of future rapid climate change. From the perspective of climate change ecology, the Late Pleistocene and the Pleistocene–Holocene transition are relevant because they represent the end of a prolonged period of climatic fluctuation on multiple temporal scales followed by rapid warming. Not only did Earth's major biomes undergo extensive compositional changes during the late Quaternary and near the termination of the Pleistocene epoch, they also underwent geographically large-scale redistributions, and did so rapidly, in some cases on the scale of decades. If rapid warming during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition contributed to—or even acted as the main driver of—mass extinctions, such a scenario would seem to suggest that contemporary climate change has a similar capacity to precipitate species losses.

The domestication of the earth entails the enfolding of ‘nature’ into human life and society. This chapter focuses on the millennia of the Holocene, when human societies consisted of food collectors and agriculturalists who essentially lived off recently fixed solar energy. In the course of its last 100 years, geography has from time to time taken in, and focused its attention on, diverse approaches to its subject matter. But as a ground bass to these variations, the relation between humans and the environment has persisted, though sometimes virtually at sotto voce level. In part, geography's attention has concentrated on landscapes as visible demonstrations, past and present, of these interrelations, but it has also taken an approach based explicitly on late-twentieth-century ecological theory. This chapter examines humans as hunter-gatherers during prehistoric times, along with the emergence of agriculture in Britain.

The Holocene is the Earth's most recent interglacial, which began approximately 11,500 years ago. Environmental change across this interval and the preceding Late Glacial, driven by factors such as orbital forcing and solar variability, can be reconstructed from archives with annually-deposited layers or annual growth layers and through the use of empirical and physical models. The early Holocene climatic optimum was an interval of warmer climate than the present day, and was followed by orbitally-related cooling which began to occur in the last 4,000–3,000 years ago. Over the last c.1200 years, three distinct climate phases are apparent in palaeo-records: the Medieval Warm Period (Ad 800–1300), the Little Ice Age (14th–16th century Ad to Ad 1850), and recent warming since AD 1850. Anthropogenic influence on global ecosystems has increased steadily since the Late Glacial, culminating in a modern-day system for which few analogues for past environments now exist.

This chapter proposes that the field of evolutionary psychology must take seriously the notion that evolution has accelerated during the Holocene. This rapid recent evolution might call into question three foundational assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the most important environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) for explaining individual differences resides in the Pleistocene; that evolutionary equilibrium models such as balancing selection are the most relevant theories for explaining heritable variation in personality, cognitive, and mental health traits; and the degree to which psychic unity or species-typicality characterizes human psychology.

This chapter presents the osteobiography of a man who lived in predynastic Egypt, between 3200 B.C. and 2000 B.C.. One of only a few Neolithic skeletons representing the early Neolithic use of this large oasis, the bones and teeth present many clues about the mobile herders and foragers and the early stages of agriculture in the Western Desert of Egypt.

This chapter presents an overview of the archaeological record of three sites occupied during the Deccan Chalcolithic period (2200–700 B.C.) in India. It describes archaeological investigations at Nevasa, Daimabad, and Inamgaon, with particular attention to evidence for subsistence practices and mortuary treatment. The chapter also focuses specifically on evidence for culture change through time at Inamgaon, the only Deccan Chalcolithic site to yield an archaeological record and human skeletal material from the Late Jorwe phase, when most other sites had already been abandoned. The apparent success of adaptive diversity as a strategy for dealing with semi-arid monsoon climate uncertainty during the Early Jorwe phase is contrasted with the severe reductions in subsistence activity, shifts in species preferences, and evidence for culture change in the Late Jorwe phase.

This book addresses the question of how the removal of whales in various fisheries influenced the workings of modern oceans. Despite the recent and dramatic nature of these events, their consequences are both controversial and poorly documented. This chapter presents a comparative view of other systems in which food web reorganization has apparently followed anthropogenic disturbances to key vertebrates. It argues that prehistoric, historic, and present-day reductions in some vertebrate populations may have been initially triggered by human action. These reductions subsequently distorted ecological dynamics, leading to ecosystem simplification or decay. The chapter turns to deep history in an effort to examine terrestrial vertebrate extinctions in the late Pleistocene and Holocene. It also discusses historic and contemporary examples of strong species interactions and ecosystem decay, starting on land and moving to coastal seas.

The research reported in this chapter has proceeded on the assumption that zooarchaeological, stable isotopic, and ancient DNA analyses can, in combination, elucidate the longer-term histories of northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) in the North Pacific. After a decade of collaboration by investigators from several institutions and agencies, this expectation has proved to be justified. This chapter reviews current state of knowledge about the distribution of northern fur seal remains in the Greater Monterey Bay region, commenting on emerging geographic and temporal patterns. It then presents detailed data on the ecology of present-day northern fur seals and discusses possible differences in ecological parameters between the ancient California Callorhinus population and its contemporaneous cousins north of Oregon. It also considers how these factors, in concert with human predation, may have contributed to the Middle to Late Holocene demise of near-coastal rookeries in California. Finally, it outlines some ways in which collaborative approaches can shed light on emerging questions and problems in northern fur seal historical ecology.

Many events in global tectonics and high latitude climate had significant effects on Cenozoic climate evolution. This chapter explores three revolutions in climate research that have dramatically altered our perception of global and African climate. First, the discovery that large magnitude climate events occurred abruptly, sometimes in as little as decades, has prompted high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions and new conceptions of climate dynamics. Second, recent climate studies have revealed significant tropical climate variability. Modern observational climate data have indicated that the largest mode of global interannual climate variability is the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific. Revised estimates of tropical sea surface temperatures during global cool and warm events have revealed significant tropical sensitivity to global climate change. Third, the role of the tropics in global climate change has been reconceptualized. This chapter also discusses the modern climate of Africa, abrupt events in the Paleocene, Oligocene Antarctic glaciation and Southern African climate, mid-Miocene climate change in Africa, plio-Pleistocene environmental change, cool and dry conditions during the Last Glacial Maximum, and Holocene climate.

Madagascar's living lemurs (order Primates) belong to a radiation recently ravaged by extirpation and extinction. There are three extinct and five extant families (two with extinct members) of lemurs on an island of less than 600,000 square kilometers. This level of familial diversity characterizes no other primate radiation. The remains of up to seventeen species of recently extinct (or subfossil) lemurs have been found alongside those of still extant lemurs at numerous Holocene and late Pleistocene sites in Madagascar. The closest relatives of the lemurs are the lorisiform primates of continental Africa and Asia; together with the lemurs, these comprise the suborder Strepsirrhini. With regard to extinct lemurs, morphological, developmental, and molecular data support a sister taxon relationship for the Palaeopropithecidae (four genera) and the Indriidae. This chapter describes the systematic paleontology of subfossil lemurs of Madagascar.

The Quaternary was a time of dramatic evolutionary change, due to strong climatic latitudinal gradients. Oceanic biotic exchanges occurred between the Arctic, east Pacific, and from the equator, particularly in times of high sea levels. Prior to the cutoff of the Pacific from the Caribbean, due to the Isthmus of Panama (3 Ma), there was some transfer of fauna such as fishes in the Gobiidae (gobies) and Labridae (wrasses). Fossil evidence supports the west coast as an area that supported speciation throughout the Cenozoic. Comparatively, there has been less extinction on the west coast than the Atlantic or South America in the Pliocene and Pleistocene.

One of the most intractable problems in archaeology is that of deep-time memory. There has not been an entirely happy history to the proposition that peoples can package, archive, and transmit an historical account of past episodes of stress and surprise (to their bio-physical or their social environments), including a “pro-active” calculus of how to assess and implement successful (or failed) responses in the, often remote, past. The Mande of arid West Africa (including the Sahel) live with precipitation and fluvialregimes that are arguably the least predictable in the world. Our understanding of the palaeoclimatic patterning and forcing mechanisms has improved greatly. Can one imagine an integrated historical “ethno-science” linking strong Mande beliefs and values to these deep-time lessons about the world in which their ancestors lived?

The Earth is moving into a new era, frequently referred to as the Anthropocene, in which anthropogenic drivers have become major determinants of the trajectory of the Earth system. Compared to the Holocene, a relatively benign era from the perspective of human well-being, the Anthropocene is emerging as a more turbulent era featuring processes of change that are often nonlinear, frequently abrupt, typically surprising, and generally challenging from a human perspective. Our basic understanding of governance, derived from the effort to solve largescale environmental problems like the depletion of stratospheric ozone remains relevant in this setting. But now we must supplement this understanding with new perspectives on meeting needs for governance that will augment the social capital available to those responsible for creating and implementing governance systems that will prove effective in addressing problems like climate change and the loss of biological diversity.

This chapter develops a reading practice for the Anthropocene by tracing the reflections on extinction that recur throughout Alfred Tennyson’s magisterial elegy, In Memoriam (1850). It asks how the poem’s treatment of extinction changes when it is read as an account of anthropogenic extinction, the decimation of species arising explicitly from human action and linked (both metaphorically and literally) to imperial conquest. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a new kind of human “species being,” that is, the human as geophysical force within the Earth system, which appears in the poem through extended metaphors linking human evolution to industrial processes and imperial conquest thus speaking to one of the most difficult (and controversial) challenges that the Anthropocene lays before the humanities: thinking the human in species terms. In the process, the chapter makes a case for elegy as both an ethical and political stance complement to conservation.

Earth mounds are Late Holocene sites that have received little interpretation in Northern Australia’s archaeological record due to their visible similarity to natural features. This chapter will show how Indigenous traditional knowledge, coupled with new analytical techniques, has expanded the study of these sites in new directions. Indigenous communities’ engagement with their landscape and cultural epistemologies have provided concepts and evidence-based practices that take the interpretation of these sites beyond the biased lens of Western suppositions. The archaeology of listening is paramount in the interpretation of both the past and present meanings of these sites in Indigenous Australian communities.