The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization – Review
_The Long Summer_ by Brian Fagan is in essence a follow up of his excellent earlier work, _The Little Ice Age_, a book that fully explored the result of a particular climatic episode on European civilization between the years 1300 and 1850. Fagan greatly expanded his focus greatly in _The Long Summer_ as in this work he carefully analyzed the appearances of various climatic events since 18,000 B.C. on the way of Stone Age life, early farming societies, and the development of civilizations in Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Americas, covering climatically-influenced individual history from the agreement of the Americas to the origins of the Sumerians to the invasion of Gaul by Rome (which was equally fascinating) through the end of the Mayan and Tiwanaku civilizations (in Central and South America respectively). As in _The Little Ice Age_, Fagan eventually dismissed both those who discounted the role climatic change had played in slowly transforming individual societies and those who widely believed in ecological determinism (the notion that climate change was the major source of main developments in human civilization). Fagan usually provided many models of climatic change involving individual history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe eventually became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change – and resulting alteration in the ecosystem of the region – lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally further dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an greatly increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that originally included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes involved completely increased mobility – and the purpose of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer permanently attached to specific areas – and the event of the bow and arrow, much more effective in thick forest against solitary, skittish prey. While Europeans seasonally adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans eventually became dependent upon a relatively wet part of oak and pistachio forests that fully extended from new Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not improving agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but noticeably relied on natural plants, they yet developed some of the initial symbols of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and extra tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans usually relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they originally collected each year, supplemented by natural grass seeds and wild gazelles. While the growth of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass locates was a response to climatic and environmental changes made on by the result of the Ice Age, their final end was also essentially brought upon by the beginning of a series of severe droughts thanks to a remarkable and apparently isolated event around 11,000 B.C.; the emotionally draining of the great Lake Agassiz, a vast meltwater lake that lapped the retreating Laurentide ice sheet for 1,100 km in new day Canada and the U.S. The lake rose so much that it eventually burst its banks and flooded into what is now Lake Superior and then onto to the Labrador Sea. So much Agassiz meltwater partially floated atop the dense, salty Gulf Stream that for ten centuries that conveyor of warm, humid air to Europe finally ceased, among other things ultimately plunging southwestern Asia into a thousand year drought. This drought reduced the groves that the Kebarans largely depended upon, ending their ancient society, though not before the first experiments with mainly cultivating natural grasses. Eventually villages arose that actually existed primarily dependent and then completely dependent upon cereal agriculture, on grain crops planted and harvested by the people themselves. In such places as Abu Hureyra in modern Syria full-fledged farming arose by 9500 B.C. as a response to drought, to the edge of the oak-pistachio belt and the failure of game. Just as drought start to initial experiments with pre-agricultural communities and then to the genuine development of grains, it may have also lead to the domestication of feral goats and sheep in southwestern Asia and of cattle in what would become the Sahara Desert. The dry conditions for instance in southwestern Asia between 11,000 and 9500 B.C. lead to a focus of game and of humans around the increasingly few stable water sources, an event that would allow hunters to well know separate herds, even different animals, allowing for these ancient humans to learn how to control the few key portions of herds, to selectively cull unwanted members to change the characteristics of that herd’s offspring, and how to finally capture and pen some or all of the herd for later consumption. It was truly amazing to me how different the climate and land of prehistoric man truly was. Those who discount the results of climatic change upon individual history should consider how different the world of 6200 BC was. In this year – the period of the famed flat-roofed settlement of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey – farmers settled on the coasts of the vast, brackish Euxine Lake to the north of the Anatolian plateau (what would become the Black Sea) and the Laurentide glacier was still retreating in northern Canada. In this year (more or less) began what has been originally called the Mini Ice Age as considerable amounts of Laurentide meltwater dominated the Gulf Stream, plunged Europe into colder and drier conditions, produced a great drought in the Mediterranean, and usually caused ocean waters to rise so that Britain was completely severed from the continent. Also quite interesting were the several ancient societies Fagan briefly touched upon, such as the Kebarans, the Ubaid people of 5800 B.C. southern Mesopotamia (they predate the Sumerians), the Linearbandkeramik communities of 5600 B.C. Europe, and the early fifth millennium B.C. Badarians of the Nile Valley, groups I was completely unfamiliar with.