What impact did extreme climate change have on life during the last Ice Age?

We warmly congratulate our colleague Marjolein D. Bosch on her newly acquired ERC Starting Grant. Her COPE project will investigate the influence of climatic changes on human behaviour during the last Ice Age.

The onset of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 30–25,000 years ago was marked by extreme climate fluctuations in Europe. Nevertheless, people lived near glaciers and adapted their behaviour to the harsh living conditions. As part of the ERC Starting Grant project entitled »The role of climate change on past human living conditions: Resource acquisition strategies and landscape use in eastern Central Europe from the Gravettian Golden Age to the Last Glacial Maximum« (COPE), Marjolein D. Bosch will now investigate the challenges faced by Ice Age hunter-gatherer groups. For example, which animals and plants humans used when resources became more and more scarce and what strategies they developed to survive in such an extreme climate.
Material for the planned analyses comes from the Grub-Kranawetberg I and II sites in Lower Austria. These sites offer exceptionally well-preserved organic remains from the period leading up to the Last Glacial Maximum. Using the latest methods in the fields of sediment biomarkers, stable isotope analysis and palaeogenetics, COPE will reconstruct the local environmental conditions in terms of palaeotemperatures, plant vegetation and prey availability in the landscape. A new focus is on water – both as a resource and as a habitat to be exploited.

By looking where on the landscape different resources were gathered COPE will explore how the different utilisation strategies were linked. This, in turn, will enable us to answer questions such as: Where did people obtain the materials for making stone tools as the glaciers advanced? Which animals did people hunt when fewer and fewer animals were available in the landscape? With trees also becoming less frequent in the landscape, what did people use for fuel for fires and building materials. How did this change the way they constructed their campsites?

Marjolein D. Bosch: »With my project, I want to explore new ways of investigating past habitats and perishable resources. By linking procurement strategies, COPE will create a new conceptual framework for analysing the way humans lived and used their surrounding landscape in the past, which can also be applied to sites where no organic remains have been preserved. In this way, the project will change our understanding of human resilience in the past.«