Ancient Coastlines
Information on past climates is primary of relevance to archaeology because of what it tells us about the effects on the land and on the resources that people needed to survive. The most crucial effect of climate was on the sheer quantity of land available in each period, measurable by studying ancient coastlines. These have changed constantly through time, even in relatively recent periods, as can be seen from the Neolithic stone circle of Er Lannic, in Brittany, France (once inland but now half submerged on an island) or medieval villages in east Yorkshire, England, that have tumbled into the sea in the last few centuries as the North Sea gnaws its way westward and erodes the cliffs. Conversely, silts deposited by rivers sometimes push the sea farther back, creating new land, as at Ephesus in western Turkey, a port on the coast in Roman times but today some five kilometers inland.
Nevertheless, for archeologists concerned with the long periods of time of the Paleolithic period there are variations in coastlines of much greater magnitude to consider. The expansion and contraction of the continental glaciers caused huge and uneven rises and falls in sea levels worldwide. When the ice sheets grew, the sea level would drop as water became locked up in the glaciers; when the ice melted, the sea level would rise again. Falls in sea level often exposed a number of important land bridges, such as those linking Alaska to northeast Asia and Britain to northwest Europe, a phenomenon with far reaching effects not only on human colonization of the globe but also on the environment as a whole-the flora and fauna of isolated or insular areas were radically and often irreversibly affected. Between Alaska and Asia today lies the Bering Strait, which is so shallow that a fall in sea level of only four meters would turn it into a land bridge. When the ice sheets were at their greatest extent some 18,000 years ago (the glacier maximum), it is thought that the fall was about 120 meters, which therefore created not merely a bridge but a vast plain, 1,000 kilometers from the north to the south, which has been called Beringia. The existence of Beringia (and the extent to which it could have supported human life) is one of the crucial pieces of evidence in the continuing debate about the likely route and date of human colonization of the New World.
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