The Impact of Rapid Climate Change on prehistoric societies during the Holocene in the Eastern Mediterranean

ABSTRACT – In this paper we explore the impact of Rapid Climate Change (RCC) on prehistoric com-munities in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Early and Middle Holocene. Our focus is on the so-cial implications of the four major climate cold anomalies that have recently been identified as key time-windows for global RCC (Mayewski et al. 2004). These cooling anomalies are well-dated, with Greenland ice-core resolution, due to synchronicity between warm/cold foraminifera ratios in Medi-terranean core LC21 as a proxy for surface water temperature, and Greenland GISP2 non sea-salt (nss) [K+] ions as a proxy for the intensification of the Siberian High and for polar air outbreaks in the northeast Mediterranean (Rohling et al. 2002). Building on these synchronisms, the GISP2 age