Cemetery find reveals how ancient humans dealt with climate change

Radiocarbon dating of human remains in a Russian cemetery from 8,000 years ago has revealed how ancient people dealt with a changing climate.

Researchers led by Professor Rick Schulting, from Oxford University’s School of Archaeology, found that human and animal remains near a lake in Russia date from a short period, which coincided with rapid cooling.

The remains in the cemetery date from a short period of just 100-300 years, centring on 8,250 to 8,000 before the present day, the scientists said.

They added that the cemetery shows that groups of hunter gatherers may have gathered together into a larger settlement during the cold period.

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The researchers write: "The team believes the creation of the cemetery reveals a social response to the stresses caused by regional resource depression...[it] would have helped define group membership for what would have been previously dispersed bands of hunter-gatherers - mitigating potential conflict over access to the lake’s resources

"But when the climate improved, the team found, the cemetery largely went out of use, as the people presumably returned to a more mobile way of life and the lake became less central."

The Holocene — the current geological epoch which began approximately 11,700 years before present — has been relatively stable in comparison to current events.

But there are a number of climate fluctuations recorded in the Greenland ice cores.

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The best known of these happened 8,200 years ago, the largest climatic downturn in the Holocene, lasting one to two centuries.

Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov is one of the largest Early Holocene cemeteries in northern Eurasia, with up to 400 possible graves, 177 of which were excavated in the 1930s by a team of Russian archaeologists.

Nearby Lake Onega, as the second largest lake in Europe, had its own ecologically resilient microclimate.

This would have attracted game, including elk, to its shores while the lake itself would have provided a productive fishery.

Because of the fall in temperature, many of the region's shallower lakes could have been susceptible to the well-known phenomenon of winter fish kills, caused by depleted oxygen levels under the ice.

The behavioural changes — to what could be seen as a more 'complex' social system, with abundant grave offerings — were situation-dependent.

But they suggest the presence of important decision makers and, say the team, the findings also imply that early hunting and gathering communities were highly flexible and resilient.

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