Environmental dynamics of the western European Mediterranean landscape during the Pleistocene to Holocene transition

Abstract

A strategic aim of research into climate change in the distant past is to respond to the contemporary challenges of global warming at the present. Determining the processes of adaptation by ecosystems to these challenges, evaluating the effects of environmental change on human communities and finding which regions are more or less sensitive to climate change are among the key topics of environmental research today. Throughout the past millennia, some of the most abrupt environmental upheavals were the successive phases of the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene transition, ranging from cold and dry to mild and damp climates. These phases differed in intensity and effects across all regions of the planet. In this paper, the long-term changes to both vegetation cover and human settlements within the upper Ebro river basin (northern Iberia, western Mediterranean) are shown by new palaeoenvironmental sequences from two archaeological sites dated between ca. 14,000 and 8,000 cal bp, which serve as proxy evidence for past vegetation cover. Summed radiocarbon probability distributions of other nearby archaeological sites were also used to study the dynamics of land occupation throughout the period. The main findings point to vegetation changes changing from the dominance of open landscapes with pines and deciduous woods during the late Pleistocene to the dominance of deciduous forest cover with few areas with open landscapes and far fewer pinewoods during the early Holocene.