Earliest Mediterranean long-distance sea journeys were sustained over at least a millennium

The discovery that remote Mediterranean islands were colonised before the invention of agriculture has upended long-standing views about the maritime capabilities of Europe’s last hunter-gatherers.

New evidence from Malta published today (28 July 2026) in PNAS Nexus now shows that these hunter-gatherers were engaging in repeated long-distance sea journeys of at least 100km, likely between Sicily and Malta for at least a millennium.

The study, led by Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn of the University of Liverpool with Professor Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and colleagues from the University of Malta and University of Cambridge, showed that the Maltese Islands were too small to sustain a hunter-gatherer population large enough to survive in isolation for centuries. The continuous presence of hunter-gatherers in Malta for a millennium can only be explained if the occupation was supported by overseas social networks underpinned by repeated long-distance sea voyaging.

“The ability to engage in long-distance seafaring marks a major transition in human history, in which previously impassable maritime barriers became the frontiers of new connections. In the Mediterranean, single-stage, long-distance open-water sea voyaging is first documented in the Mesolithic.” Explains Professor Eleanor Scerri, a senior author on the study. “On Malta, we documented a continuous Mesolithic presence from at least 8400 to 7400 years ago. Was this an accidental stranding, however, or is it representative of a previously unknown seagoing network?”

To answer the question, the research team, led by the University of Liverpool’s Computational Archaeology of the Stone Age group, combined insights from modern ethnography with palaeoclimate data and sea-level models to examine likely hunter-gatherer population sizes and long-term survival possibilities.

“Unlike farmers, hunter-gatherers are dependent on wild, natural food resources, whose abundance is largely governed by the climate for a given area, with larger areas and more productive environments able to support larger populations,” says Dr Blinkhorn, the lead author of the study. “By modelling the relationship between modern hunter-gatherer population sizes and their environment, we were able to predict potential past population sizes using high-resolution palaeoclimate datasets. While Malta was once connected to Sicily via a land-bridge, this was inundated by around 14 thousand years ago, cutting Malta off and limiting the land area to support hunter-gatherer populations.”

The study’s estimates showed that the maximum possible population size Malta could have supported after its isolation from Sicily ranged between 170-144 individuals, with more realistic, ethnographic-derived predictions estimating a considerably smaller population. This low population density prediction spans the 1000-year timeframe that recent archaeological discoveries document hunter-gatherer occupation of Malta

“Long-term survival of a population, such as over a millennium evident in the archaeological record, would require 500-1000 reproductive-age adults, before we include the young and the elderly,” explains Dr Blinkhorn. “Given that we predict far smaller population sizes in Malta, these hunter-gatherers must have been connected to a wider gene pool to prevent inbreeding and collapse – the only way this would be possible is through repeated, overseas connections.”

“Our study proves that Malta was part of a hitherto unknown, sustained, long-distance sea voyaging network,” adds Professor Scerri. “The last European hunter-gatherers were not only reconfiguring the use of land and sea in a way that preempts the modern world, they were also maintaining social networks in ways we don’t see before, connecting islands and coastlines, perhaps even across continents.”

Dr Blinkhorn is supported by a University of Liverpool University Research Fellowship. The research was funded by a European Research Council Grant awarded to Professor Scerri.

Click here to read the article in PNAS Nexus. 

Three new kings, and a new understanding of the Assyrian King List

 

For approximately a century, researchers studying the Assyrian Empire’s history have relied on the Assyrian King List (AKL) as the definitive record of Assyrian monarchs and their chronology, especially for later periods of Assyrian history. But a recent article published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, entitled “Three New Kings of Assyria,” posits that the AKL may not be as authoritative or as objective as previously considered, and presents for the first time the identities of three kings whose reigns were omitted from the list, but can now reconstructed from other evidence. Ultimately, write Alexander Johannes Edmonds and Eckart Frahm, “early Neo-Assyrian political history was much messier, but also more interesting, than has so far been recognized.”

The first previously overlooked king revealed by Edmonds and Frahm called himself Tiglath-pileser, after a former ruler of the kingdom. This new Tiglath-pileser ruled in parallel to the official king, Aššur-dān III, who was his nephew, and whom he attempted to overthrow in the wake of a portentous solar eclipse. Records of his administration persist in a clay tablet housed in the British Museum that is inscribed with a royal grant, and suggest that he reigned from roughly 763-762 BCE before he was deposed.

Evidence for the second king comes from a stela discovered in 1894 in Tell ‘Abta, Iraq, and the long-standing controversy surrounding the overwriting of the name of the contemporary Assyrian monarch on the stela with that of another “Tiglath-pileser.” This mystery can be put to rest, write Edmonds and Frahm, through the admission of another monarch to the list of kings, a Shalmaneser who reigned immediately prior to the accession of Tiglath-pileser III in 745 BCE.

The third case investigated by Edmonds and Frahm is that of Aššur-uballiṭ. In a text on a cuneiform tablet, king Tukultī-Ninurta II describes a libation vessel created by Tukultī-Ninurta I and later restored by Aššur-uballit—but no monarch of that name is recorded in the AKL between Tukultī-Ninurta I and Tukultī-Ninurta II. The reign from 913-912 BCE of a previously unremarked Aššur-uballit, write Edmonds and Frahm, would explain this reference, as well as the identity of a king represented by a statue discovered at Aššur whose head has been removed and whose arms and insignia are worn away.

The existence of these three kings, write the authors, invites a reconsideration of the AKL. Perhaps it is not “an impartial chronographic work” but rather "a legitimizing canon of kings, which was periodically updated to remove short-lived or parallel Neo-Assyrian rulers." This political dimension of the AKL, Edmonds and Frahm continue, opens up new ways of studying the list: “What and who determined a king’s ‘canonicity’? How did this intersect with Assyrian cultural memory or notions of kingship? Was the AKL’s function at all practical, or solely ceremonial?” With three hidden stories uncovered—so far—the AKL becomes a renewed object of interest and inquiry. In turn, the early history of the Assyrian Empire has suddenly become much more complicated, but also exciting than previously thought. As such, Edmonds and Frahm’s discovery offers a dynamic new perspective on the formation of the world’s first empire.

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Journal

Journal of Cuneiform Studies

DOI

10.1086/741239 

Archaic human parents also had a hard time raising kids

 

Deformed head shapes in fossilized humans show their infants were probably just as helpless as modern human babies, requiring constant parental care

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Tokyo

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image: 

The crosses on these graphs represent the great apes (violet = P. troglodytes, blue = P. paniscus, orange = Pongo, black = Gorilla), while the light blue circles = H. sapiens, and red stars = fossil Homo (LB = Liang Bua, Ng = Ngandong, Sm = Sambungmacan). The further the point is from 0 on the vertical axis, the greater the distortion. On the right, the density curves show the distributions of the pooled great ape (dotted line) and modern human (solid line). 

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Credit: Kaifu Y et al. 2026 CC BY

Archaic human parents had to look after helpless infants like modern day parents do, according to new research. Human babies are born less developed than those of other great apes, and so are unable to move as freely. A common result of this is deformational plagiocephaly, also called flat head syndrome. Professor Yousuke Kaifu at the University of Tokyo led a team which studied head shapes from scans of living infants, historical Japanese skeletal remains, fossilized specimens of Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis, and compared these to measurements of dry skulls from other great apes. Human head shapes across the ages, as well as the fossilized samples, exhibited a far wider range of deformation. The team sees this as evidence that archaic humans birthed helpless infants, with implications for childcare practices and potentially cooperative social behaviors dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

Many parents understand the fear of taking a fragile newborn home. Compared to other great apes – large primates classified in the same family as humans – our children are born completely helpless, with weak neck muscles, soft cranial bones and still underdeveloped brains, which continue to grow rapidly after birth. 

One theory for this, called the obstetrical dilemma, sees it as a trade-off for being able to walk upright (which affects the shape of the birth canal) and have large-brained offspring. But when in our evolutionary timeline did this helpless newborn phase – and the parental responsibilities which go with it – begin? 

It is a difficult question to answer. Fossils of our archaic ancestors are mostly fragmented and rarely of infants. However, a new approach, which can be applied to fossils of any maturity, may provide the evidence researchers have been looking for.   

“Our method looks for changes in the shape of the cranium (the top part of the skull) which occurred around or soon after birth and remained to some extent into adulthood,” explained Kaifu from the University Museum at the University of Tokyo. “Nowadays, this is a common condition, called deformational plagiocephaly. The shape of the head is affected by the baby lying the same way frequently due to how they are held or laid down, and from the baby’s neck muscles being too weak to control the position of the head.”

Kaifu was inspired after visiting the skeleton of Homo floresiensis (who lived more than 50,000 years ago) in Indonesia in 2007. He was struck by the deformed shape of their skull which, from the structure of the bones, appeared to have occurred after birth. To understand why, he contacted a hospital clinician who identified the cause as deformational plagiocephaly. 

This led Kaifu to theorize that skull deformation, which can be identified as not being caused by disease or post-burial, may be an indicator of helplessness in infancy, as it implies a soft, underdeveloped skull and head immobility.

To test this theory, he gathered a team including researchers from Japan and Indonesia to collect and compare CT scans of 123 modern, healthy infants aged from 1 day to 17 months old, measurements from historical human skulls from Japan dated from about 200 to 1,000 years old (385 people in total), great ape skulls (996 individuals), and fossilized human skulls of Homo erectus (five fossils) and Homo floresiensis (one fossil). 

From the results, the team could see that other great apes – including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans – which are born more physically independent and capable, were grouped within a narrower range of cranial deformity. The human samples – including fossilized specimens – exhibited a much broader range of deformation and head shapes.

“This was exciting as we don’t know a lot about the behavior of Homo erectus. They lived between more than 1 million to 110,000 years ago, and we only have a tiny archaeological record from their stone tools. However, if they gave birth to physically helpless babies, then this tells us something about their behaviors, as they would need to have cared for the baby as diligently as we do,” said Kaifu. “This likely would have necessitated some social interactions, as it would be difficult for the mother to care for and protect the newborn in that environment, where there would have been other large predators, on her own.” 

Another surprising outcome of the research was the level of head deformation in Homo floresiensis. Diminutive in stature (affectionately referred to as the “hobbit”), their brain was also much smaller, comparable in size to a chimpanzee, so it is unknown why their situation wasn’t more similar to other great apes.

“Even though their brain size was much smaller, their newborn stage was already following the same kind of difficult process as larger-brained modern human ancestors,” said Kaifu. “Rather than just being a trade-off for our large brains, the challenging responsibility of childcare and supporting mothers with their infants may actually be an integral part of our human history, at least since the time of the common ancestor of Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis more than 1 million years ago.” 

---- Paper/ Contact Details ----
Paper:
Yousuke Kaifu, Wataru Yano, Makoto Hikosaka, Daisuke Shimizu, Takeshi Nishimura, Daisuke Kubo, Rusyad Adi Suriyanto, Jatmiko, Thomas Sutikna, Naoki Morimoto and Iwan Kurniawan. “Cranial evidence for human-like helpless infancy in Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Date: July 29th, 2026. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2026.1055 

Diet reveals what life was like 2,700 years ago in a local community: Gender inequality,...

 

 social status, and migration

Biological and archaeological analysis of human remains from a 2,700-year-old Italian necropolis reveals, through what the people ate, how they lived, how they moved, and how they organized their society

An international study led by the Universities of Córdoba and Pisa used isotopic analysis to reconstruct the dietary traces left in the human remains found in an Italian necropolis, revealing what daily life was like in that community 2,700 years ago. Despite the passage of time, certain patterns of behavior recur: diet, human mobility, gender differences, and the role of funerary symbolism to signify social status.

The study focused on the Novilara necropolis, one of the largest burial grounds of the Picene culture (a pre-Roman culture in central Italy that was contemporaneous with the Tartessian societies on the Iberian Peninsula, among others), and combined bioarchaeological and multi-isotopic analyses.

Specifically, the research team analyzed the stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, "chemical footprints" of diets, recorded in bones, teeth, hair, and nails that can be preserved for thousands of years. "As they form, bones and teeth absorb the isotopic composition of the food and water consumed. As a result, analyzing them can provide information about diet, mobility, and the environment in which people lived," explained Zita Laffranchi, a researcher in the Prehistory Department at the University of Córdoba.

While isotopes provide information about diet, food offers clues about social behavior. In this regard, the study revealed a diet that differed by sex (men had greater access to animal protein compared to women), and a society in which between 1.4% and 6.4% of the people came from other areas, suggesting mobility and contact with other populations, including some that were even distant.

Their diet, primarily based on cereals and meat rather than fish — despite the proximity of the Adriatic Sea, just 6 kilometers away — suggests that the prestige reflected in some tombs wasn't always accompanied by noticeable differences in the living conditions of those who were buried.

"The study shows that social inequality cannot be interpreted solely based on the objects placed in graves," Laffranchi explained. Individuals buried with valuable objects, such as amber ornaments or weapons, showed no isotopic evidence of eating better than those buried more modestly. This suggests that the social status conveyed by the grave was a symbolic construct that did not necessarily reflect the deceased's position or living conditions. Instead, it likely stemmed, at least in part, from the decisions and traditions of the community's survivors.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, provides new evidence about the lifestyles of pre-Roman Iron Age societies and helps us understand the extent to which social differences, gender, and mobility were reflected in daily life. "The study demonstrates the potential of bioarchaeological approaches to understand how people experienced identity, mobility, and social differences in the past," said Marco Milella, a researcher at the University of Pisa.

Reference

Laffranchi, Z., Beck De Lotto, M.A., Delpino, C., Lösch, S., Milella, M. (2026). Multi-isotopic insights into diet, mobility, and status in the Picene necropolis of Novilara, Italy (8th–7th centuries BCE). Journal of Archaeological Science 192, 106633. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2026.106633

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Journal

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jas.2026.106633 

Many ancient societies buried their dead at home. Why did the practice start...

 

and why has it largely disappeared?

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image: 

The slab-stone roof of a subterranean tomb on residential Terrace 925 at El Palmillo, Santiago Matatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico (ca. 700–850 CE). The image foreground is the surface of a domestic patio with small remnants of white plaster, while the tomb was situated under a room of the house (positioned on the terrace). Note the small carved stone, which was part of the patio banquette in front of the tomb. When in use, the tomb was entered from the patio.

 

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Credit: Photo credit: Linda M. Nicholas, Field Museum.

There are countless different cultures and societies around the world, spanning thousands of years. One thing that they all have in common is that no matter what, death is a part of everybody’s life. Examining how different societies commemorate their dead can give archaeologists and anthropologists insights into how those societies work and what matters to them. In a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity, a team of researchers explored the practice of burying the dead in or near their family’s houses.

“In the deep past, settlements were places where both the living and the dead coexisted and felt at home,” says Sabina Cveček, an archaeologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Residential burials, in which people are buried inside of or very close to their houses, are no longer common, especially in the West. But over the past few centuries, cultural anthropologists have documented several societies all around the world that have residential burials. Why some societies began burying their dead at home, and why so many of them later stopped, has remained a mystery. “Until now, nobody had tried to find a way to predict whether or not a society would practice residential burial,” says Cveček, the new paper’s lead author.

“One theory about why some societies started to practice residential burials has to do with where people lived, and how long they lived there,” says Cveček. “Some researchers theorized that once people started settling down, they might have buried their dead by their houses to mark their territory.”

To investigate this theory, Cveček examined a database of cultural records, or ethnographies, dating back several centuries. She built a dataset of 60 different societies from around the world and found that 12% of the ones in her sample practiced residential burials. That number seemed low to Cveček and her colleagues.

“I went over the data with Carol Ember, an anthropologist at Human Relations Area Files at Yale, and we agreed, we weren’t seeing that many residential burials in these records. We wanted to know, what’s going on?” says Cveček. Cveček, Ember, and their colleague Tim Earle, an archaeologist at Northwestern University, reached out to fellow archaeologists at the Field Museum, who were familiar with the seemingly more frequent occurrence of residential burials in ancient sites.

The researchers consulted another database and built another dataset based on archaeological records. Unlike the ethnographies, which were written by anthropologists about societies that they observed in real life in the past few centuries, the archaeological data included information about societies from thousands of years ago. “Ethnographies are about as old as the practice of cultural anthropology, so they only date back a couple hundred years, but archaeology can tell us about societies from way longer ago,” says Cveček.

The research team examined burial records from 49 different archaeological sites from around the world. They found a lot more evidence of residential burials than they had in the ethnographies of more recent societies. “It was incredible to see, about 33% of the communities we looked at had at least some family members buried within or around their homes,” says Cveček.

The team wanted to know why residential burials were so much more common in the earlier societies than in the more recent ones. While some anthropologists and archaeologists have hypothesized that residential burials were associated with people living in more permanent residences, the data didn’t support this idea.

“We found that there wasn’t a strong link between how transient or permanent a society was, and how likely they would be to practice residential burial,” says Cveček. But the databases did yield a potential reason why the more recent ethnographies contained so few descriptions of residential burials in comparison to the older archaeological findings.

“In the ethnographies I read, in many cases, anthropologists would say that the society being described used to practice residential burials, but that they stopped when major organized religions and colonization arrived in those places. For instance, they’d say that a society used to bury their dead at home, but now they use Christian cemeteries outside the settlement, or that a society used to bury their dead at home, but with the spread of Hinduism, they adopted cremation,” says Cveček. “It seems like colonization really impacted burial practices on a global scale for the past four centuries and beyond, and that’s part of why residential burials are much less common in the ethnographic record.”

Gary Feinman, a co-author of the study and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, notes that colonization doesn’t explain all of the changes in burial practices that the team observed, but that change over time is common in cultural practices overall. “A key finding of this paper is that even a practice as sensitive and important to most people as how and where we inter our dead can shift in specific cultural contexts over time. Human cultural behaviors are dynamic, not static, and for some of the cases studied here, the changes in burial practices even shifted well before the Colonial era,” says Feinman.

Overall, the findings offer anthropologists a deeper understanding of humanity. “The choices people make about burying their loved ones provide insights for archaeologists into how their societies were organized,” says William A. Parkinson, Curator & Associate Director of Anthropology at the Field Museum and the paper’s senior author.

While questions remain about what makes a society more likely to practice residential burials, Cveček says that the underlying story of the practice can help us forge connections to our fellow humans around the world.  “I think the most beautiful message from this study is that there are so many different practices of mourning the dead. But residential burial, keeping the dead close to you at home, was a practice present around the globe throughout human history,” says Cveček.

This study was contributed to by Sabina Cveček (Field Museum), Timothy Earle (Northwestern University), Carol Ember (Yale University), Gary Feinman (Field Museum), and William A. Parkinson (Field Museum).

 

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Journal

American Antiquity

DOI

10.1017/aaq.2026.10208 

Fossil footprints reveal body size and group dynamics of 1.4-million-year-old human relative

 

New study provides a rare snapshot of “fossil behavior” from Paranthropus boisei, an ancient hominin group in northern Kenya

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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image: 

One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated. A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.  

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Credit: © Kay Behrensmeyer

To the point

• A snapshot of ancient behavior: Fossil footprints from northern Kenya preserve evidence of eight Paranthropus boisei individuals moving together along a lakeshore around 1.4 million years ago.
• Unexpectedly large body size: The footprints indicate human-like body sizes — up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms — larger than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.
• Insights into group dynamics: The tracks suggest that mostly adult male individuals traveled together, hinting at a complex social structure in this extinct human relative.
• Lake margins as key habitats: Hundreds of hominin footprints from the East Turkana region show that ancient human relatives repeatedly used lakeshore environments over more than 100,000 years.

A new study documents a set of fossil footprints preserving a snapshot of “fossil behavior” from an ancient hominin group along a lakeshore in northern Kenya around 1.4 million years ago.

An international team of researchers from the US and Kenya found tracks showing eight Paranthropus boisei individuals — an extinct “cousin” of modern humans — in one place at one time. All of the individuals are thought to be adults, and some appear to have been much larger in body size than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.

Large footprints, large bodies

Analytical methods that this research team pioneered in 2024 helped distinguish these new tracks as belonging to Paranthropus boisei, based on their apparent foot anatomy and movement patterns. However, their sizes were surprising. “The sizes of the footprints indicate human-like body sizes – up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms”, says lead author Kevin Hatala, of Chatham University and an associated researcher of the Department of Human Origins at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Until recently, the overwhelming majority of Paranthropus boisei fossils were skulls with massive jaws and teeth, and little has been known about their anatomy from the neck down. But these latest findings challenge earlier studies that suggested Paranthropus boisei was considerably smaller than the contemporary Homo erectus, which is a possible direct ancestor of modern humans.

Fossil footprint surfaces are known to form very quickly and therefore can also be a useful window into hominin behavior and group dynamics. “The fact that eight, mostly adult male, Paranthropus boisei individuals seemingly traveled together as a group, without females or children, hints at a complex social structure in this species”, says co-author Neil Roach of Harvard University. “They may have lived in large groups, where males competed for mates, but also tolerated each other at times for safety in a dangerous environment.”

This discovery adds an important behavioral dimension to the fossil record of Paranthropus boisei, a species that lived alongside early members of the genus Homo, yet took a different evolutionary path.

Returning to the lake shore

A growing assemblage of ancient human footprints in lake margin environments also points toward this being an important habitat with critical resources for our extinct relatives. “To me, it is amazing that we have the same kind of lake margin deposits in two areas of East Turkana that are 40 kilometers apart, at about the same age”, says co-author Kay Behrensmeyer of the Smithsonian Institution.

At this point, the research team has documented hundreds of hominin footprints across more than a half-dozen sites in this region. Behrensmeyer predicts that, “if we can understand what geological conditions allowed these tracks to be preserved, we should know more about why hominins continued to return to the lake shore environment over more than 100,000 years.”

Building a photo album of the past

The team will be back in Kenya this year to continue research into these special fossil footprint sites. “Each site represents a snapshot of our past, and we are quickly building a photo album with several different windows to hominin anatomy, locomotion, behavior, and environments during the Early Pleistocene,” says Hatala.

Co-author Purity Kiura of the National Museums of Kenya adds, “The discovery of these fossil footprints along the margins of Lake Turkana reinforces the region's global importance in understanding human evolution, preserving remarkable evidence of how our ancient relatives lived 1.4 million years ago. It further strengthens Kenya's position as one of the world's leading paleoanthropological landscapes and highlights our responsibility to protect this irreplaceable heritage.”

Combining new analytical approaches with exceptional fossil footprint sites, the study demonstrates that ancient tracks can reveal the anatomy and movement of extinct human relatives, while also providing rare insights into their social lives and environments.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2530996123 

Unravelling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Stockholm University

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image: 

The Eastern Mediterranean dried as part of a broader climate transition; weakening monsoons and shifting atmospheric circulation reduced moisture from Africa and rainfall across the region. Image: Katherine Power/Stockholm University

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Credit: Katherine Power/Stockholm University

The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.

“Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the drought associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe”, says Katherine Power, PhD student, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, and first author of the study.

Around 3,200 years ago, many of the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Mycenaeans, Minoans and Hittite Empire, experienced widespread societal collapse. Although severe droughts have long been linked to this period, the climatic processes behind these events remain uncertain. To investigate this, Katherine Power and Qiong Zhang, professor in paleoclimate modelling, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University and co-author of the study, used a state-of-the-art climate model to reconstruct the evolution of the Mediterranean climate over the past 8,000 years.

“Our results show that the region underwent a gradual drying trend over thousands of years, driven by slow changes in Earth’s orbit. Superimposed on this long-term trend we also found shorter-term fluctuations in the Atlantic Ocean and atmosphere”, says Katherine Power.

The researchers found that most severe droughts occurred when several natural climate cycles aligned, temporarily reinforcing one another and producing droughts far more intense than the long-term drying trend alone.

“The convergence of these processes pushed the Eastern Mediterranean beyond a critical hydroclimatic threshold, reducing water availability and increasing pressure on agriculture and food security within already vulnerable societies”, Katherine Power says.

These findings change how we think about past droughts, the researcher say, and understanding these processes is highly relevant today:

“The Mediterranean is one of the world’s climate change hotspots and the area is projected to become warmer and drier during the coming century. Our findings suggest that future drought risk may depend not only on long-term human-driven warming, but also on how natural variability in the Atlantic Ocean interacts with that background trend”, Katherine Power explains.

By revealing how different climate processes combine to amplify drought, this research can provide new insights into the risks of future hydroclimatic extremes in a warming world, the researchers say. 

The study “Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse” was published in Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed5439.
For this research the model EC-Earth was used.
 

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aed5439 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse