Early–middle Holocene ecological change and its influence on human subsistence strategies in the Luoyang Basin, north-central China

2018/02/21 by Junna Zhang, Zhengkai Xia, Xiaohu Zhang +8 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Palynology #Holocene #Steppe #Holocene climatic optimum #Vegetation (pathology) #Subsistence agriculture #Deciduous #Structural basin #Geography #Radiocarbon dating #Ecology #Floodplain #Physical geography #Aridification #Geology #Archaeology #Pollen #Agriculture #Climate change #Paleontology #Biology

paper · doi:10.1017/qua.2017.104

openalex publication_date 2018/02/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/16

Abstract

Abstract In north-central China, subsistence practices transitioned from hunting and gathering to millet-based agriculture between the early and middle Holocene. To better understand how ancient environmental changes influenced this shift in subsistence strategies and human activities at regional to local levels, we conducted palynological and lithologic analyses on radiocarbon-dated sediment cores from the Luoyang Basin, western Henan Province. Our palynological results suggest that vegetation shifted from broad-leaved deciduous forest (9230–8850 cal yr BP) to steppe-meadow vegetation (8850–7550 cal yr BP), and then to steppe with sparse trees (7550–6920 cal yr BP). Lithologic analyses also indicate that the stabilization of the Luoyang Basin’s floodplain after ~8370 cal yr BP might have attracted people to move into the basin, promoting the emergence of millet-based agriculture during the Peiligang culture period (8500–7000 cal yr BP). Once agricultural practices emerged, the climatic optimum after ~7550 cal yr BP likely facilitated the expansion of the Yangshao culture (7000–5000 cal yr BP) in north-central China. As agriculture intensified, pollen taxa related to human disturbance, such as Urtica , increased in abundance.

Citations

• Forcing of the cold event of 8,200 years ago by catastrophic drainage of Laurentide lakes
• Holocene climate changes in the monsoon/arid transition reflected by carbon concentration in Daihai Lake of Inner Mongolia
• The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice: Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze
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• CONISS: a FORTRAN 77 program for stratigraphically constrained cluster analysis by the method of incremental sum of squares
• IntCal13 and Marine13 Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curves 0–50,000 Years cal BP
• Vegetation succession and East Asian Summer Monsoon Changes since the last deglaciation inferred from high-resolution pollen record in Gonghai Lake, Shanxi Province, China

Cited by

• Mount Song [wikipedia]

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