A long hard road… Reviewing the evidence for environmental change and population history in the eastern Adriatic and western Balkans during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene

Abstract

The eastern Adriatic and western Balkans are key areas for assessing the environmental and population history of Europe during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. It has been argued that the Balkan region served as a Late Glacial refugium for humans, animals, and plants, much like Iberia and the Italian Peninsula and in contrast to the harsh conditions of Eastern and Central Europe. As post-glacial amelioration occurred and sea level rose, these regions to the north and west of the Balkan Mountains became forested and were populated by Mesolithic forager-fishers. Meanwhile, to the south, the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East began to cause large-scale environmental as well as lifestyle changes. Even as the Balkan Peninsula was a likely crossroads on the route for the spread of agriculture and herding from Southwest Asia into Europe, issues such as pre-Neolithic settlement, the discussion of human-environment interactions, and the role of climate events such as the 11.4, 9.3, and 8.2 ka cal BP in this critical landscape are often overlooked. Efforts to counter this challenge have been hampered by an apparent lack of data, so that the region hardly occurs in distribution maps. In part this is due to patchy research and a complicated political history, which have contributed to a fragmented archaeological and paleoecological record. Yet, as we show here, there is in fact plenty of evidence available for review. We present a survey of different proxies for environment and settlement throughout the Late Pleistocene and into the Early Holocene, combining radiocarbon data with zooarchaeological, lithic, and palynological records. By mapping this evidence, we are able to discuss the impact of climate change during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition and consider the role of environment and landscape on human population distribution at this crossroads in place and time.

Micromorphology, mineralogy, and geo-chemistry of sediments at the Tham Lod rock shelter archaeological site in Mae Hong Son, Thailand: suggestions of a late Pleistocene climate

“…This interpretation also explains the climatic conditions of the Holocene Epoch (the last 11,500 yr BP), which are similar to those of the present time (Sun and Li, 1999). The episode fell within the period of the end of the last ice age (15,000-8000 yr BP), and sea level rise impelled the human population to change their lifestyle from hunting to agriculture (Birch and Linden, 2018). The sea level change during the postglacial period caused substantial changes in the natural environment and human ecology.…”

Spearheading into the Neolithic: Last Foragers and First Farmers in the Dinaric Alps of Montenegro

“…This recognition of the difficulties attached to discovering Mesolithic-age deposits stands in contrast to a recent suggestion by Gurova & Bonsall (2014), that the invisibility of Mesolithic occupation across south-eastern Europe should be taken at face value, as evidence that large tracts of land under a dense canopy cover remained uninhabited during the Mesolithic due to a concomitant reduction in ungulate biomass. They further suggest that concentrations of sites are to be expected only along riparian corridors, in wetland inland areas rich in aquatic resources and along coasts, with largely unoccupied hinterlands (see also Pilaar Birch & Vander Linden, 2018: 185). While tackling this model on empirical grounds for the whole of the region remains outside the remits of this article, our presentation of the Mesolithic evidence from Montenegro may contribute to a further contextualization of the problem of Mesolithic invisibility in south-eastern Europe, to which we will return in our discussion.…”

Holocene hydroclimate changes in continental Croatia recorded in speleothem δ13C and δ18O from Nova Grgosova Cave

“…In continental Croatia, near NG cave, rich archaeological material can be found, such as the world-famous Neanderthal site in the cave in Hušnjakovo brdo (40 km NE) (Gorjanović-Kramberger, 1906), Vindija Cave (75 km NE) (Karavanić et al, 2006), and Veternica Cave near Zagreb (15 km E) (Banda and Karavanić, 2019; Malez, 1979), at the time when NG was still a cavern without a natural entrance. By the end of the Early Holocene, Late Paleolithic, and Mesolithic sites in littoral Croatia were inhabited by forager-fishers (Pilaar Birch and Linden, 2018), but their way of life and population distribution were substantially affected and governed by the environmental changes since sea-level fluctuations considerably reshaped the landscape (Pilaar Birch and Miracle, 2017), as reconstructed, for example, in Vela Spila Cave (Korčula Island) site (Dean et al, 2020). Human activities through this period left imprints mainly in clastic cave sediments, but the speleothems were too insensitive to record the overall human impact to the environment.…”