Climate impact on ancient societies

Annual-resolved European summer climate has, for the first time ever, been reconstructed over the past 2,500 years. Tree rings reveal possible links between past climate variability and changes in human history. Climate change coincided with periods of socioeconomic, cultural and political turmoil associated with the Barbarian Migrations, the Black Death and Thirty Years' War. An international research team of archaeologists, climatologists, geographers and historians compared variations in European summer climate with conspicuous events and episodes in human history. Their study provides new evidence that agrarian wealth and overall economic growth may was impacted by climate change. The researchers reconstructed the history of central Europe's summer precipitation and temperature for the past 2,500 years, extending the record more than 1,000 years further than previous studies into the past. Their results are based on measurements of annual tree-rings from thousands of sub-fossil, archaeological, historical and living tree samples from Germany, France, Italy and Austria.