AncientPages.com – When the ancestors of Māori made landfall in Aotearoa some 750 years ago, it marked the final stop of the greatest expansion of human migration in prehistory. Much of their story—exactly when they arrived and where they initially settled, how quickly the population grew, and how they sustained themselves and adapted during rapidly […]

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – About 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, a major climate shift took place, and Sahara turned into a desert. Before this occurred, the region was inhabited by an ancient civilization scientists still know little about. The Sahara is the largest desert in the world. At 3-1/2 million square miles, Sahara is […]

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com –We rely on climate models to predict the future, but models cannot be fully tested as climate observations rarely extend back more than 150 years. Understanding the Earth’s past climate history across a longer period gives us an invaluable opportunity to test climate models on longer timescales and reduce uncertainties […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of the evolution and dispersal of modern humans and their ancestors is not well established. Particularly for the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) between 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, no continuous high-resolution paleo-environmental records […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Our ancestors dealt with large-scale environmental challenges thousands of years ago. Understanding their traditional practices may inform modern Europeans racing to adapt to climate change today. Heathlands, with their scrubby, woody plants and sandy soil, cover large tracts of Europe. Although the soil is not very nourishing, heathlands are home to unique flora […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study in Nature Communications that was published with the help of a University at Albany archaeologist. Ruins of the monumental center of Mayapan. […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – El Nino has been a major driver of societal collapse, various catastrophes and cultural change in coastal Peru for millennia, but it isn’t the only culprit. In a new study, University of Maine researchers warn against over-interpreting the role climatic change, like an El Nino event, plays in societal and […]

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A new study of the ancient world of Anatolia—now Turkey—shows how they adapted to climate change but offers a warning for today’s climate emergency. The efforts of ancient populations to minimize the impacts of climate change were undermined during longer climate shifts when it is combined with other events such […]

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – A study carried out in the area around the Pego-Oliva Marshland Natural Park, between Valencia and Alicante, reveals how the rise in sea level impacted the human groups that inhabited this area of the Mediterranean coast during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Hercules Tower, La Coruña, Spain. Credit: Diego Delso […]