Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The climate of the past 100 000 years
- 3 Life in the ice age
- 4 The evolutionary implications of living with the ice age
- 5 Emerging from the ice age
- 6 Recorded history
- 7 Our climatic inheritance
- 8 The future
- Appendix Dating
- Glossary
- References
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Life in the ice age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The climate of the past 100 000 years
- 3 Life in the ice age
- 4 The evolutionary implications of living with the ice age
- 5 Emerging from the ice age
- 6 Recorded history
- 7 Our climatic inheritance
- 8 The future
- Appendix Dating
- Glossary
- References
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894), Mid-winterPoint Barrow in northern Alaska is a desolate place. In the driving sleet of an August afternoon it is hard to imagine that this remote Inuit settlement has been occupied for thousands of years. It seems amazing that the community has been able to survive here for so long. The reason is, however, simple. Every year bowhead whales migrate past the point and the Inuit have been able to catch sufficient for their needs and store the flesh and blubber in the permafrost to provide food throughout the year. The reliability of this migratory pattern is the key to continued occupation of the site. The bowhead whale returned to the Arctic Ocean after the end of the last ice age, when the land bridge of Beringia was flooded by rising sea levels around 10 kya. Thereafter, they commonly ranged from the Beaufort Sea to Baffin Bay. Bowheads feed year-round in the Beaufort, Chukchi and Bering seas. They use a variety of strategies, including feeding under ice and swimming in groups in V-shaped formation, to increase feeding efficiency. Their movement into the Beaufort Sea following the receding ice may have been one of the reasons why the Inuit moved into the North American Arctic in the early Holocene.
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- Climate Change in PrehistoryThe End of the Reign of Chaos, pp. 74 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005