Does Increasing Social Complexity Buffer Energy Consumption from the Effects of High Frequency Climate Variation? A Western European Case Study

Summary

Humans, like any other organism, must continuously adapt to or modify their surrounding environment to maximize their fitness. One of the main sources of environmental variation that humans must cope with is climate variation. Adjustment to climate variation may include increasing investments in infrastructure (social, technological, cognitive), which acts as a buffer, filtering out the effects of higher frequency climate variation on the ability of individuals and populations to consume energy, and thus maximize an individual’s fitness or the mean fitness of a population. As investments in infrastructure increase, social complexity increases, and higher frequency climate signals (such as annual temperature or precipitation) should become increasingly more out of phase with annual energy consumption (representing a social output). Using energy consumption levels and climate data from Western Europe over the last 400 years, we evaluate this idea that increases in infrastructure increasingly buffered the energy consumption dynamics of populations from high frequency climate variations. The results of our analysis are important for developing a general theory of human responses to climate change that can be applied to archaeological case studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• PAGES (Past Global Changes) PEOPLE 3000 - PalEOclimate and the PeopLing of the Earth   •
• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22128