Amelioration of habitat since the early Holocene contributed to the origin of agriculture in the farming-pastoral zone of northern China

The origin of agriculture in the farming-pastoral zone of northern China remains in dispute.The central region of the Inner Mongolia Plateau is located in the core area of the farming-pastoral zone;thus,it is a critical region for exploring the origin of the dryland farming system in northern China.This study selected the Yumin Site and Banan Site,which belong to the Yumin Culture-the beginning of Neolithic culture in Inner Mongolia-as the research objects.Based on the quartz optically stimulated luminescence(OSL)dating on the sedimentary sections from the Yumin site(YM)and Banan site(BN1 and BN2),the Holocene chronology framework of each section was established.After that,by identifying carbonized grains in the Yumin site and the multi-proxy analysis of each section,we investigated the relationship between the origin of agriculture and climate change in this region.The results revealed that the timing of the origin of agriculture recorded in the Yumin site lagged behind the timing of a significant increase of precipitation during the early Holocene but coincided with the timing of a significant increase of vegetation around 8.4 ka.This phenomenon was further confirmed by the published high-resolution paleoenvironmental records from the surrounding area of the Yumin Culture.We propose that with the gradual amelioration of hydrothermal conditions since the beginning of the Holocene,the regional ecosystem had been improved,resulting in the gradual conversion of the land surface from infertile sand to organic-rich soil,providing an appropriate environmental foundation for the origin of dryland farming in northern China around 8.4 ka.This study highlighted that the“accumulative environmental effects”during the early Holocene played a vital role in the origin of agriculture in northern China and provided a reference for agricultural management in the context of future climate change.

Climate change and plague history in Europe

Previous research that reported the linkage between climate change and plague activity primarily refers to the immediate effect of short-term climatic variation. Yet, decades of discussion about the climate-plague association cannot determine the precise role of climate in shaping plague dynamics. One reason for this discrepancy originates from the narrow selection of spatio-temporal settings for comprehensive analysis of the correlation, leading to a limited consideration of the complexity of possible dynamics.By analyzing a 414-year long record of plague outbreak in pre-industrial Europe and the corresponding climatic data in multi-scale,we find little evidence to support climate-plague correlation in(1) both climatic variations and large-scale climatic phenomena,(2)both country scale and continental scale,(3) annual to inter-annual scale, and(4) both linear and non-linear analytic approaches. The null-result should not be viewed as a general rejection of other recent findings related to climate-plague association; nevertheless,it suggests that a wider consideration of scales, sensitivity checks and consideration of contexts should be included in explaining and predicting plague transmission under contemporary global climate conditions.

Quantitative analysis of the impact of droughts and floods on internal wars in China over the last 500 years

Although many large-N quantitative studies have evidenced the adverse effects of climatic extremes on social stability in China during the historical period, most of them rely on temperature and precipitation as major explanatory variables, while the influence of floods and droughts on social crises is rarely measured. Furthermore, a comparison of the climate-society nexus among different geographic regions and at different temporal scales is missing in those studies. To address this knowledge gap,this study examines quantitatively the influence of floods and droughts on internal wars in three agro-ecological(rice, wheat,and pastoral) regions in China in AD1470–1911. Poisson regression and wavelet transform coherence analyses are applied to allow for the non-linear and non-stationary nature of the climate-war nexus. Results show that floods and droughts are significant in driving internal wars in historical China, but are characterized by strong regional variation. In the rice region, floods trigger internal wars at the inter-annual and multi-decadal time scales. In the wheat region, both floods and droughts cause internal wars at the inter-annual and multi-decadal time scales. In the pastoral region, internal wars are associated with floods only at the multi-decadal time scale. In addition, the multi-decadal coherence between hydro-climatic extremes and internal wars in all three of the agro-ecological regions is only significant in periods in which population density is increasing or the upper limit of regional carrying capacity is being reached. The above results imply that the climate-war nexus is mediated by regional geographic factors such as physical environmental setting and population pressure. Hence, we encourage researchers who study the historical human-climate relationship to boil down data according to geographic regions in the course of statistical analysis and to examine each region individually in follow-up studies.

Differentiations of geographic distribution and subsistence strategies between Tibetan and other major ethnic groups are determined by the physical environment in Hehuang Valley

The people of the Tibetan Plateau have received extensive attention from scholars because of their unique adaptability to the low temperature and anoxic environments. However, the Tibetan communities and their habitats in the low-altitude regions of the plateau have rarely been studied in a scientific manner. Based on the extraction of geographic information of 197 towns in the Hehuang Valley and on variance analysis, this study examines the habitats and subsistence strategies of the Tibetans and other major ethnic groups in the low-latitude region of the Tibetan Plateau. Our statistical results show that the annual average temperature of Tibetan habitats in the Hehuang Valley is relatively high. The relatively warm environment of the valley allows the Tibetans in that area to cultivate wheat and barley and raise cattle and sheep—a subsistence strategy significantly different from that of other Tibetans in the high-altitude regions in the Tibetan Plateau. In addition, the Tibetan communities in the Hehuang Valley include similar agri-pastoral ethnic groups (including Hui and Salar), both of which adopt similar subsistence strategies. The agricultural ethnic groups (Han and Tu) live in a relatively cool and humid environment facilitating agricultural production, while the agri-pastoral ethnic groups (Tibetan, Hui, and Salar) inhabit relatively warm and arid environment in the valley. Due to the lack of agricultural activities, agri-pastoral groups must also engage in animal husbandry to supplement their diet. In the Ando Tibetan region, the subsistence strategies of the ethnic groups are closely related to their physical environment.Those ethnic groups communicate among themselves, integrate, and influence each other, resulting in a diversified culture. This study proves that the habitat variation at a regional scale corresponds significantly to the variation of subsistence strategies. Our findings may further refine knowledge about the human-environmental relationships of Tibetans and lead future research towards using quantitative methods to analyse the intersection of physical environment and ethnic groups' distribution.

Two centuries of April-July temperature change in southeastern China and its influence on grain productivity

China is a traditional agriculture based country and one main region for crop production is southeastern China where temperature is a dominant climate variable affecting agriculture. Temperature and social disturbances both influence crop production, yet distinguishing their relative impacts is difficult due to a lack of reliable, high-resolution historical climatic records before the very recent period. Here we present the first tree-ring based warm-season temperature reconstruction for southeastern China, a core region of the East Asian monsoon, for the past 227 years. The reconstruction target was April-July mean temperature, and our model explained 60.6% of the observed temperature variance during 1953–2012.Spatial correlation analysis showed that the reconstruction is representative of April-July temperature change over most of eastern China. The reconstructed temperature series agrees well with China-scale(heavily weighted in eastern China) agricultural production index values quite well at decadal timescales.The impacts of social upheavals on food production, such as those in the period 1920–1949, were confirmed after climatic influences were excluded. Our study should help distinguish the influence of social disturbance and warm-season temperature on grain productivity in the core agricultural region of China during the past two centuries.