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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, epic overview of climate and human history, May 16, 2005
_The Long Summer_ by Brian Fagan is in essence a follow up of his excellent earlier work, _The Little Ice Age_, a book that explored the effect of a particular climatic episode on European civilization between the years 1300 and 1850. Fagan expanded his focus greatly in _The Long Summer_ as in this work he analyzed the effects of various climatic events since 18,000 B.C. on the course of Stone Age life, early farming societies, and the evolution of civilizations in Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Americas, covering climatically-influenced human history from the settlement of the Americas to the origins of the Sumerians to the conquest of Gaul by Rome (which was fascinating) through the end of the Mayan and Tiwanaku civilizations (in Central and South America respectively). As in _The Little Ice Age_, Fagan dismissed both those who discounted the role climatic change had played in transforming human societies and those who believed in environmental determinism (the notion that climate change was the primary cause of major developments in human civilization).
Fagan provided many examples of climatic change affecting human history. Between 13,000 and 8,000 B.C. Europe became covered in forest thanks to warming climates and retreating glaciers. This climatic change - and resulting alteration in the ecology of the region - lead to the extinction of the large and medium-sized herd animals that were the favored prey of the Cro-Magnons (such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and reindeer) and their replacement by smaller, generally more dispersed game like red deer, wild boar, and aurochs. Not only did this change in fauna lead to a change in hunting techniques, it also lead to an increased reliance on plant food and in general a much broader diet that included nuts, seeds, tubers, fruit, and fungi. Other changes included increased mobility - and the end of cave art, as tribes and bands were no longer attached to certain areas - and the development of the bow and arrow, much more effective in dense forest against solitary, skittish prey.
While Europeans adjusted to a world without megafauna, by 11,000 B.C. a group known as the Kebarans became dependent upon a relatively moist area of oak and pistachio forests that extended from modern Israel through Lebanon and into much of modern Syria. Though not developing agriculture per se, as they did not plant crops but rather relied on wild plants, they nevertheless developed some of the early signs of agriculture, such as pestles, mortars, and other tools to process the seeds and nuts that they harvested, the Kebarans relying on the millions of acorns and pistachios that they collected each year, supplemented by wild grass seeds and wild gazelles.
While the development of permanent Kebaran villages anchored to groves of nut-bearing trees and grass stands was a response to climatic and ecological changes brought on by the end of the Ice Age, their eventual end was also largely brought upon by the onset of a series of intense droughts thanks to a remarkable and seemingly distant event around 11,000 B.C.; the draining of the immense Lake Agassiz, a huge meltwater lake that lapped the retreating Laurentide ice sheet for 1,100 km in modern day Canada and the U.S. The lake rose so much that it eventually burst its banks and flooded into what is now Lake Superior and then onto to the Labrador Sea. So much Agassiz meltwater floated atop the dense, salty Gulf Stream that for ten centuries that conveyor of warm, moist air to Europe ceased, among other things plunging southwestern Asia into a thousand year drought. This drought eliminated the groves that the Kebarans depended upon, ending their prehistoric society, though not before the first experiments with cultivating wild grasses. Eventually villages arose that existed primarily dependent and then completely dependent upon cereal agriculture, on grain crops planted and harvested by the people themselves. In such places as Abu Hureyra in modern Syria full-fledged farming arose by 9500 B.C. as a response to drought, to the end of the oak-pistachio belt and the decline of game.
Just as drought lead to early experiments with pre-agricultural communities and then to the actual cultivation of grains, it may have also lead to the domestication of wild goats and sheep in southwestern Asia and of cattle in what would become the Sahara Desert. The arid conditions for instance in southwestern Asia between 11,000 and 9500 B.C. lead to a concentration of game and of humans around the increasingly few permanent water sources, an event that would allow hunters to intimately know individual herds, even individual animals, allowing for these ancient humans to learn how to control the few key members of herds, to selectively cull undesirable members to change the characteristics of that herd's offspring, and how to eventually capture and pen some or all of the herd for later consumption.
It was amazing to me how different the climate and terrain of ancient man truly was. Those who discount the effects of climatic change upon human history should consider how different the world of 6200 BC was. In this year - the time of the famed flat-roofed settlement of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey - farmers lived on the shores of the vast, brackish Euxine Lake to the north of the Anatolian plateau (what would become the Black Sea) and the Laurentide glacier was still retreating in northern Canada. In this year (more or less) began what has been called the Mini Ice Age as vast amounts of Laurentide meltwater suppressed the Gulf Stream, plunged Europe into colder and drier conditions, produced a profound drought in the Mediterranean, and caused ocean waters to rise so that Britain was finally severed from the continent.
Also quite interesting were the several prehistoric societies Fagan touched upon, such as the Kebarans, the `Ubaid people of 5800 B.C. southern Mesopotamia (they predate the Sumerians), the Linearbandkeramik communities of 5600 B.C. Europe, and the early fifth millennium B.C. Badarians of the Nile Valley, groups I was completely unfamiliar with.
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40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Portrait of our own future?, March 27, 2004
This review is from: The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Hardcover)
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization is another of Brian Fagan's volumes on the interaction of climate and human history. (Others I have read are the Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, and Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations). As with the others, this book chronicles the changes in climate throughout the globe and notes the changes effected in the human condition. Whether there is actually a direct correlation between the two or not it would be difficult to really prove since historic events are nonrepeatable, but the frequency with which major changes in human behavior have occurred when climate has shifted is certainly very suggestive. Like most such claims, however, there is probably more to the reality of the situation than is apparent from this distance. His topic, however, is not without significance for our own world, so I highly recommend reading it! The author discusses El Nino, the Southern Oscillation, and the Gulf Stream "conveyor belt" and the effects of the introduction of increased fresh, cold water into it as he does in his other books. A more complete discussion of these phenomena was given in Little Ice Age, however, so if the reader is a little confused by the more limited introduction in this book or is simply curious about them, he/she should definitely read LIA for clarification. Some of the author's points were not new to me. In particular I had read a collection of articles on the concept of human evolution as driven by continental drift and its effect on the Gulf Stream and climate. I have also recently read a book (Secrets of the Sands: The Revelations of Egypt's Everlasting Oasis), which discusses climate change and lifestyle, in this instance that in Egypt and its Oases. The theory that the invasions of the Sea Peoples into Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt were climate driven had been discussed as early as the '60s and '70s. Other points were probably predictable but had never occurred to me, for instance that the attacks on settled societies by desert invaders were driven by the desperate living conditions of the latter with a major dry spell. Most of the history of the ancient near east is studied from the perspective of the city dwellers, the marginal populations being treated as "unfortunate" intrusions which brought collapse. One almost gets a sense that they did so arbitrarily just to be difficult! An interesting book. It might provide something of a background for courses on ancient civilization. Certainly it would make the ebb and flow of nomadic populations and their impact on the settled societies they boardered more sensible. For those WRITING PAPERS in history, climatology, sociology, and political science: one might look at the effects of climate on ancient societies and predict the likely outcome of a similar down turn on today's populations. Look at writers like Per Bak (How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criticality), whose studies of sentinel events suggests that every possible event will ultimately occur with a different probability and at unpredictable times, or Stuart Kaufman (At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity) whose work suggests that such events actually help increase organization. How might these authors' works actually support Fagan's thesis? What would they say about the future of our own civilization?
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A must-read, August 16, 2004
This review is from: The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Hardcover)
In this highly informative book, author and professor of anthropology, Brian Fagan, looks at the changes in climate that have racked the Earth since the end of the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago. During these years, as civilization began, and then spread, periodic and unpredictable climate changes have affected human history, often with catastrophic results. With chapters covering climactic events from 18,000 years ago to right up to the present, the author spins a fascinating tale of climate and history, as they changed together throughout the millennia.
Overall, if found this to be a very interesting book. On the down side, its various chapters do not tie together in a progressive unfolding of history, but instead hop from subject to subject, like a series of articles. But, that said, this is a fascinating book. The author has an excellent grasp on both human and climactic history, and he succeeds in putting them together to tell the story of mankind, bringing out information that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
I really enjoyed this book, and must admit to have found its lesson of unpredictable, but inevitable, climate change to have been quite sobering. If you want to understand human history, and I mean really understand it, then you must read this book!
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