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Abstract: Despite the present hyper-aridity, archaeological investigations in South-east Arabia have demonstrated that the region supported extensive human communities throughout the Neolithic and Bronze Age. These early populations utilised the region’s natural environment in a variety of ways, ranging from the exploitation of coastal resources to practicing pastoral and agrarian lifestyles in the interior. Palaeoclimate data suggests the corresponding period was characterised by considerable climatic variability yet, to date, few studies have attempted to investigate the relationship between climate, the environment and early human populations in the region. This paper combines new high-resolution palaeoclimate data from Awafi palaeolake, United Arab Emirates (UAE), with the region’s archaeological record from the Neolithic through to the onset of the Bronze Age. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that the environment of South-east Arabia offered different constraints and opportunities for early human occupation and subsistence. In particular, abrupt phases of aridity are demonstrated to have had a profound impact. Most notable is the change which occurred following the onset of climatic aridity at 5900 cal yr BP, when the region’s semi-nomadic, herder-gatherer populations abandoned much of the landscape and concentrated in selected environmental refugia, such as along the northern Omani coast. Human repopulation during the Bronze Age coincided with a return to more pluvial conditions under which a network of oasis agricultural settlements appeared along the piedmont zone of the northern Hajar Mountains. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) lies at the convergence of the Asian winter and summer monsoons and westerlies, making it an ideal place for studying the effects of climatic change, owing to its fragile ecological environment and unique geographical location. This paper reports on a multi-proxy analysis consisting of magnetic susceptibility, total organic carbon content (TOC), pollen, grain size, and geochemical parameters from the peat deposit in the Gonghe Basin to reconstruct the Holocene millennial-scale climatic variation. The results indicate that the climate tended to be warm and humid since 10.0 cal ka BP, but it deteriorated obviously (cold and dry) in 8.6–7.1 cal ka BP. The regional optimal warm and humid period was from 7.1–3.8 cal ka BP, although there were frequent climatic fluctuations during that time. Thereafter, the climate became cold and dry. 10 millennial-time-scale cold events were recorded, which were coincident with climatic records from deep sediments in the North Atlantic Ocean, ice cores, lakes, peat, and aeolian deposits in the QTP. In addition, we discovered that the southwestern monsoons forced by solar insolation in the Holocene have crucial effects on regional climatic change, and the millennial-scale cold fluctuations are possibly related to the thermohaline circulation (THC). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]