Geoenvironmental modeling of past socio-technological change: how agriculture and deforestation came to Europe
Event details
| Date | 19.10.2009 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Dr. Carsten Lemmen, Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS-Forschungszentrum (DE) |
| Location |
GR B3 30
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Quantifying the anthropogenic role in prehistoric land cover changes serves to establish a baseline for comparison of current human impact on the environment, and to separate the anthropogenic impact on from naturally occurring changes in our environment. I present a simple global mathematical model of regional socio-cultural development embedded in the prehistoric geoenvironmental context. The space-time evolution of the transition to farming in 685 simulation regions realistically hindcasts the pattern of agricultural onset and its spread. Accuracy of the model is tested against data on the emergence of the Neolithic in Europe, where the model adds a new consistency argument that this process was driven mainly by cultural diffusion (the spread of technologies and ideas) and less by demic diffusion (the migration and outplacement of people). Farmers intensively used resources and space, both of which were provided by widely forested areas in temperate regions. Using scaling parameters from the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), simulated population density and subsistence style, the land requirement for growing crops is estimated. The intrusion of cropland into potentially forested areas is evaluated as carbon loss from deforestation. The land demand in important prehistoric growth areas leads to large-scale deforestation of up to 12% of the potential forest; in total, 27 Gt carbon are lost from forests between 10,000 BC and 2000 BC and were replaced by crop land.
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- General public
- Free