Full name: The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

Author: Brian Fagan Year: 2003 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Science, Non Fiction, Anthology Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780465022823 0465022820

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. Similar books: Elixir by Brian Fagan Cro-Magnon by Brian Fagan Floods, Famines, and Emperors by Brian Fagan Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum by William F. Ruddiman The Winds of Change by Eugene Linden The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade Breaking the Maya Code by Michael Coe Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Bryan Sykes The Incredible Human Journey by Alice Roberts Out of Eden by Stephen Oppenheimer Origins Reconsidered by Richard Leakey The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza After the Ice by Steven Mithen The Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson Ancestral Journeys by Jean Manco The Book of Humans by Adam Rutherford The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally Written in Bones by Paul Bahn