The Long Summer
We've known for more than a century that much of human evolution took place during an Ice Age. Temperatures began to rise some 15,000 years ago, glaciers disappeared, and sea levels rose. This warm time, known as the Holocene, saw the emergence of human civilisation and all of recorded history. We didn't have a thorough record of climatic variations during the Holocene until recently. We now have it. Brian Fagan illustrates how climatic fluctuation functioned as one of history's "deeper changes," a more crucial historical component than we realise, in this intriguing and captivating study at the human implications of climate variability.
