Session Abstract

Two papers by senior historians look at the very long term of climate and the human condition. Professor Manning focuses especially on spatial change in climate, tracing the ways changing climate facilitated or redirected migration, especially in the years of human settlement of the earth from some 70,000 to 10,000 years ago. Professor Brooke focuses on the last six millennia and emphasizes abrupt, punctuated change in climate, as solar fluctuations and volcanism combined to bring occasionally deep shocks of cooling, up to and including the Little Ice Age, stressing their importance for the periodization of the long sweep of human history since the rise of the state.