Middle Holocene Climate Oscillations Recorded in the Western Dvina Lakeland

Stephen Brooks,Odile Peyron,Andrey Mazurkevich,Olga Antczak-Orlewska,Larisa Nazarova,Ekaterina Dolbunova,Emilie Gauthier,Liudmila Syrykh,Tomi Luoto,Mateusz Płóciennik,Bartosz Kotrys,Agnieszka Mroczkowska,Eva Thiebaut,Piotr Kittel,Dominik Pawłowski

doi:10.3390/w13111611

Abstract

Although extensive archeological research works have been conducted in the Serteya region in recent years, the Holocene climate history in the Western Dvina Lakeland in Western Russia is still poorly understood. The Neolithic human occupation of the Serteyka lake–river system responded to climate oscillations, resulting in the development of a pile-dwelling settlement between 5.9 and 4.2 ka cal BP. In this paper, we present the quantitative paleoclimatic reconstructions of the Northgrippian stage (8.2–4.2 ka cal BP) from the Great Serteya Palaeolake Basin. The reconstructions were created based on a multiproxy (Chironomidae, pollen and Cladocera) approach. The mean July air temperature remained at 17–20 °C, which is similar to the present temperature in the Smolensk Upland. The summer temperature revealed only weak oscillations during 5.9 and 4.2 ka cal BP. A more remarkable feature during those events was an increase in continentality, manifested by a lower winter temperature and lower annual precipitation. During the third, intermediate oscillation in 5.0–4.7 ka cal BP, a rise in summer temperature and stronger shifts in continental air masses were recorded. It is still unclear if the above-described climate fluctuations are linked to the North Atlantic Oscillation and can be interpreted as an indication of Bond events because only a few high-resolution paleoclimatic reconstructions from the region have been presented and these reconstructions do not demonstrate explicit oscillations in the period of 5.9 and 4.2 ka cal BP.

Highlights

Neolithization processes in Central and Northern Europe were mainly caused by climate fluctuations, especially during the period between 8.2 and 6 ka cal BP [1]
The Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) Ax1 of chironomid assemblages revealed a similar trend to the estimations of mean July air temperature from the Fn TS and SNP TS WA-PLS (Figure 5), which indicates that the summer temperature was the main driver of the midge communities
The estimations of mean July air temperature from the SNP TS artificial neural network (ANN) were similar to DCA Ax2 of Chironomidae assemblages, but it is a completely different trend than that marked on Ax1

Summary

Introduction

Neolithization processes in Central and Northern Europe were mainly caused by climate fluctuations, especially during the period between 8.2 and 6 ka cal BP [1]. The cold event in 8.2 ka cal BP caused the migration of Neolithic communities northward from the steppe area of the Black Sea Lowland region toward the coniferous and mixed forest belt of the East European Plain [2]. The paleoclimatic background for archeological discoveries on Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures in Eastern Europe is still insufficient. The temperature reconstructions are not available for the following publication: Tallinn region (Estonia) [12], Myshetskoe-Dolgoe Lake in Moscow [13], Lake Kenozero [14], Ukraine and Belarus [15,16]. Plant communities in the area reveal a lagged response to short-lived temperature oscillations that might have been crucial for human settlement, which made it possible to adopt different nutritional strategies at different times

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