A fascinating history of the world''s changing climate, and how
it has shaped our civilization Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in
which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000
years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and all of
recorded history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the
Holocene - the long summer of the human species. In The Long
Summer, Brian Fagan brings us the first detailed record of climate
change during these 15,000 years of warming, and shows how this
climate change gave rise to civilization. A thousand-year chill led
people in the Near East to take up the cultivation of plant foods;
a catastrophic flood drove settlers to inhabit Europe; the drying
of the Sahara forced its inhabitants to live along the banks of the
Nile; and increased rainfall in East Africa provoked the bubonic
plague. The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the
centuries-long pattern of human adaptation to the demands and
challenges of an ever-changing climate - challenges that are still
with us today.
關於作者:
Brian Fagan is one of the world''s leading archaeological
writers, and is author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors and The
Little Ice Age and the editor of The Oxford Companion to
Archaeology. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.