Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics

The Middle Holocene (8,000 to 3,000 years ago) was a time of major changes in the physical environment and in human cultures around the world. These developments appear to have been closely interrelated, and to have profound lessons for our modern civilization. Societies characterized by hereditary inequality, monumental architecture, warfare, long distance exchange, and intensive agriculture appeared in many areas during the Mid-Holocene, associated with the rise of complex chiefdoms, states and regional civilizations. On other parts of the planet small-scale agricultural or hunting gathering societies remained more or less unchanged or grew only slightly more complex. In still other areas, major population relocations or abandonments occurred.