The El Cañizar de Villarquemado pollen record covers the last part of MIS 6 to the Late Holocene. We use Tolerance-Weighted Averaging Partial Least Squares (TWA-PLS) to reconstruct mean temperature of the coldest month (MTCO) and growing degree days above 0°C (GDD0) and the ratio of annual precipitation to annual potential evapotranspiration (MI), accounting for the ecophysiological effect of changing CO2 on water-use efficiency. Rapid summer warming occurred during the Zeifen-Kattegat Oscillation at the transition to MIS 5. Summers were cold during MIS 4 and MIS 2, but some intervals of MIS 3 had summers as warm as the warmest phases of MIS 5 or the Holocene. Winter temperatures declined from MIS 4 to MIS 2. Changes in temperature seasonality within MIS 5 and MIS 1 are consistent with insolation seasonality changes. Conditions became progressively more humid during MIS 5, and MIS 4 was also humid, although MIS 3 was more arid. Changes in MI and GDD0 are anti-correlated, with increased MI during summer warming intervals. Comparison with other records shows glacial-interglacial changes were not unform across the circum-Mediterranean region, but available quantitative reconstructions are insufficient to determine if east-west differences reflect the circulation-driven precipitation dipole seen in recent decades.

Temperature seasonality, the difference between summer and winter temperature, has significant influences on global terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, most of proxy-based climate records are of limited temporal resolution and thus insufficient to quantify the past temperature seasonality. In this study, high-resolution Sr/Ca ratios of modern (live-caught) and fossil (dead-collected) Tridacna gigas shells from the South China Sea (SCS) were used to reconstruct the seawater temperature seasonality during the late Holocene. The averaged seawater temperature seasonality around 2165 ± 75 BC (4.46 ± 1.41°C, derived from the data of 18 yr) were similar to the seasonality of recent decade (4.41 ± 0.82°C during AD 1994–2005), but the temperature seasonality around AD 50 ± 40 (3.69 ± 1.37°C, derived from the data of 48 yr) and AD 990 ± 40 (3.64 ± 0.87°C, derived from the data of 11 yr) was significantly lower than that during AD 1994–2005. The reduced seasonality around AD 990 ± 40 was attributable to the unusually warm winter during the medieval times, probably caused by the weakening of East Asian Winter Monsoon. Our study highlighted the potential of T. gigas shells in providing high-resolution seasonality climate information during the late Holocene.