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Consortium wins £3m to investigate how our ancestors coped with abrupt climate change

A research consortium, led by Professor John Lowe in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been awarded funding of £3m to develop a novel approach for assessing how humans may have responded to rapid environmental changes during the recent past.

A five-year project named RESET (Response of Humans to Abrupt Environmental Transitions), funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, brings together scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Oxford, the Natural History Museum, London, and the University of Southampton, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, with expertise in human palaeontology, archaeology, oceanography, volcanic geology and past climate change.

The driving forces behind major shifts in recent human evolution and adaptation have been the subject of intense debate for more than 100 years. The funding emphasises the importance of using records from the past to meet the challenge of climate change today.

Ice-core records from Greenland have suggested that pronounced climatic shifts with severe environmental consequences are possible within as little as 20 years or less. This means that some of our ancestors experienced climatic variability perhaps as rapid as those associated with global warming today.

Our understanding of how humans responded to such abrupt events is limited however, largely because current studies are compromised by an inability to synchronise archaeological and geological records with sufficient precision.

"Being able to establish the precise temporal relationships between archaeological events and sudden changes in the environment has proved an elusive goal for scientists so far. Until this obstacle is overcome, answers to some of the most vital and intriguing questions about our recent past, and understanding fully their implications for the future, will remain tantalisingly beyond our grasp," commented Professor John Lowe, Professor of Geography and Quaternary Science at Royal Holloway and the scientific co-ordinator of RESET.

The RESET project will construct a new chronological framework for testing the hypothesis that major shifts in human development coincided with, or immediately followed, some prominent abrupt environmental transitions in the recent geological past. At the core of this framework are volcanic ash layers (tephra layers) which are widespread throughout Europe, and which represent time-parallel signatures in archaeological and geological records.

According to Professor Chris Stringer, a specialist in human evolution at the Natural History Museum and a member of the RESET team, "This project could take us into a new phase in the interdisciplinary study of prehistoric human development. Establishing the precise order of events is the key to resolving some of the long-standing debates about climate history and its impacts on the human dimension, and long-standing research questions such as the fate of the Neanderthals."

Dr Simon Blockley, from Oxford University's Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, said "Research like this is fundamental in understanding the role of climate change to the development and adaptation of our species."

For more information or to arrange interviews, please contact:

Alison Denyer
Royal Holloway Press Office
Tel:01784 443967

Press Office
University of Oxford Press Office
Tel:01865 280534

Press Office
Natural History Museum Press Office
Tel:020 7942 5654

Press Office
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton Press Office
Tel:023 8059 6001

Press Office
University of Southampton Press Office
Tel:023 8059 3212

NERC Press Office
Natural Environment Research Council
Polaris House, North Star Avenue
Swindon, SN2 1EU
Tel: 01793 411561
Mob: 07917 557215

Notes

1. The research team is led by Professor John Lowe (Geography, Royal Holloway). It includes Professor Clive Gamble (Geography, Royal Holloway), Professor Martin Menzies (Geology, Royal Holloway), Professor Mark Pollard (Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art (RLAHA) Oxford), Professor Christopher Ramsey (RLAHA,; Oxford), Dr Simon Blockley (RLAHA, Oxford), Professor Nick Barton (Institute of Archaeology, Oxford), Professor Chris Stringer (Natural History Museum, London), Professor Eelco Rohling (University of Southampton, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton), Professor Andrew Roberts (University of Southampton, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton).

2. RESET is funded by the NERC Consortium grant scheme. The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche is contributing £80,000. The project commences formally on 1 January 2008.

3. All geological dating methods are subject to some statistical uncertainty. Even in the case of radiocarbon dating, which is one of the most precise and flexible methods at scientists' disposal, age estimates can at best be narrowed down to a timespan of about a hundred years, and at worst, a few thousand. Most of the alternative dating methods are less flexible in their application and frequently produce results that are even less well constrained.

4. Explosive volcanic eruptions generate large volumes of tephra which are carried in the jet stream thousands of kilometres from the volcano. Tephras from Central Italy have been traced as far as Russia and Icelandic tephras regularly reach western Europe. A long history of explosions from Italian, Icelandic and other volcanic centres has led to a complex series of tephra layers being laid down on the sea floor, in lakes, on peat-bogs, in archaeological sites, such as shallow caves, and even on to the Greenland ice cap. RESET will use laser based technology to analyse key tephras, producing a lattice that will tie together the various records, and bring greater clarity to the sequence of climatic and human events in Europe and North Africa during the last 80,000 years.

5. RESET comprises seven strands:

1. Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe (60 to 25 ka BP) (led by Professor Chris Stringer, Natural History Museum).

2. The Impact of abrupt environmental transitions on early modern human populations in North Africa (led by Professor Nick Barton, Oxford).

3. Re-populating Europe after the Last Glacial Stage (led by Professor Clive Gamble, Royal Holloway).
   

   Strands 1 to 3 focus on major archaeological events selected as optimal for the aims of RESET: they occur during periods of abrupt environmental change; there is a rich archive of archaeological evidence; their impacts were continental or larger in scale; two of the topics fall within the radiocarbon timescale, while the third does not require a centennial resolution and is amenable to dating by alternative methods; diagnostic tephras were deposited during the periods of interest; firm collaborative agreements provide access to existing proxy data and to key sites where re-examination proves necessary.

4. Geochemical fingerprinting of tephras (led by Professor Martin Menzies, Royal Holloway).
   

   This strand will provide the volcanic ash (tephrostratigraphy) framework that underpins the project. Here the emphasis will be on maintaining and improving laboratory protocols for the detection, extraction and geochemical 'fingerprinting' of selected tephras, for testing the chemical consistency of individual tephras, and for refining their chronology.

5. Abrupt environmental transitions and tephras in marine sediment cores (led by Professor Eelco Rohling, Southampton).

6. Abrupt environmental transitions and tephras in continental records (led by Dr Simon Blockley, Oxford).
   

   Strands 5 and 6 will relate volcanic ash layers to environmental changes affecting the oceans and the European continent during the periods relevant to strands 1 to 3. These will focus on the evidence for past abrupt climatic changes in particular, and to correlating events between the oceanic, terrestrial and Greenland ice-core records.

7. Data synthesis and age modelling (led by Professor Chris Bronk Ramsey, Oxford).
   

   Strand 7 will apply newly-developed statistical modelling procedures to combine all of the stratigraphical and geochronological information harvested within the project as a whole, to synchronise the records.

Press release: 26/07

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