Vegetation and climate dynamics at the dawn of human settlement: multiproxy palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Hashilan Wetland, western Iran

Abstract

The scarcity of high-resolution palaeoclimate records from the interior of West Asia has limited our understanding of the mechanisms of past climate change and their potential impacts on early human societies of the Eastern Fertile Crescent. Here, we present a multiproxy sedimentological, geochemical and palynological record from the Hashilan Wetland in the central Zagros Mountains, spanning the time interval from 22 to 2.2 kcal bp. Our results indicate a cold, dry climate for the last deglaciation (22 to 10 kcal bp) with amplified aridity during the Last Glacial Maximum, Heinrich Stadial 1, the Younger Dryas and the 8.2 and 3.2 ka events. The Early Holocene (11.6 to 7.8 kcal bp) is characterised by prolonged dry summers, frequent spring/summer dust storms and restricted oak woodlands that gradually expanded as summers shortened toward the second half of the Holocene (<6 kcal bp). We show an out-of-phase Holocene moisture variation between the interior of West Asia and the Indian Summer Monsoon domain and conclude that summer insolation-driven latitudinal shifts of the Hadley cell played a key role in seasonality changes in the interior of West Asia by modulating the strength and pathway of the subtropical high-pressure cells. Finally, we explore possible impacts of these changes on regional prehistoric human communities.