Human Response To High Altitude Environmental Change

University Of California-San Diego Scripps Inst Of Oceanography, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Understanding how humans have managed to maintain food security while dealing with climatic change is crucial in a rapidly changing world. However, human adaptive responses to periodic fluctuations in local environment over the long term are poorly understood. Even more crucial is understanding how humans responded to climatic change, not in the few optimal areas of the world, but rather in key marginal loci where the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers and pastoralists are at stake. Archaeology is uniquely poised to answer questions such as: Why are certain types of system resilient to climate change while others fall apart? What types of strategy are adaptive not just over the short term but for millennia? Along with colleagues, Dr. Alpoim Guedes will carry out research to understand how humans modified their agricultural and pastoral strategies in the context of a series of major climatic reversals over the past two millennia. By examining the potential for different adaptive strategies at the local level and providing a long term perspective on the consequences of human decision making, this research has the potential to further the production of more diverse, and more locally-adapted food sources that are resilient in the face of climate change. In addition to serving as a field school for students from a local university, it provides an international fieldwork experience for US minority undergraduates as well as two early career scientists. Dr. Alpoim Guedes and colleagues will investigate how humans responded to and adapted to climatic fluctuations in one key marginal area: the high altitude environment of Eastern Himalayas of China. In addition to reconstructing ancient subsistence patterns through the analysis of plant and animal remains, the researchers will investigate how different types of social organization facilitated or impaired human adaptation. Project researchers will develop models to predict how crop and forage grass production was impacted by climatic change. Each of these models will be used to predict how production fluctuated not only in the past but also in future predicted scenarios. By outlining the complex interactions between different factors that determine how crops and graze resources react to changes in climatic and ecological variables, the models created for this project can be applied to other high altitude/high latitude areas worldwide, particularly those in the United States.