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Humanity evolved in a climate very different
from the present one -- in an Ice Age in which glaciers
covered much of the world. Starting about 15,000 years ago,
temperatures began to climb, the glaciers began to recede,
and sea levels began to rise. Civilization and all of recorded
history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the
Holocene. This is the long summer of the human species.
Until very recently, however, we had no
detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene.
Now we do, and Brian Fagan shows us how climate functioned
as what historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the "deeper
transformations" of history -- a more important factor
than we have heretofore understood. The interaction of climate
and history is not a matter of a single pivotal event, but
an intricate dance of challenge and response involving changing
ecosystems, technologies, and evolving political, cultural
and social systems. For all the changes, the long-term pattern
is consistent: the entire history of civilization has been
a continual process of trading up -- of accepting vulnerability
to large climate stresses in exchange for resistance to
smaller ones.
In The Long Summer, Fagan shows how
a thousand-year chill caused by the sudden shutting off
of the Gulf Stream led people in the Near East to abandon
hunting and gathering to take up the cultivation of plant
foods; how the catastrophic flood that created the Black
Sea drove settlers deep into Europe; how a subsequent warming
and drying of the Sahara forced its cattle-herding peoples
to take up a less hazardous life along the banks of the
Nile; how the Roman Empire extended north in Gaul only as
far -- and for as long -- as the climate allowed sustained
cereal farming; and how a period of increased rainfall in
East Africa in the sixth century spread rat populations
and the bubonic plague throughout the Mediterranean, and
how this in turn spurred massive migrations that helped
shape modern Europe and the Middle East.
Continuing the groundbreaking synthesis
widely acclaimed in The Little Ice Age and Floods,
Famines and Emperors, The Long Summer illuminates
for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation
to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate
-- demands and challenges that are still with us today.
Brian Fagan is one of the world's leading
archaeological writers. An Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he is the
author of Floods, Famines and Emperors, The Little
Ice Age, Before California and many other popular
books on the past, and the editor of The Oxford Companion
to Archaeology. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
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