The following is a guest post by Ornob Alam, a graduate student in Michael Purugganan’s lab at New York University. Ornob’s PhD projects examine the demographic and evolutionary history of domesticated Asian rice in the context of past climate change and human migrations; he is on Twitter as @genomeinquirer.
While modern, anthropogenic climate change threatens to be unprecedented in rapidity and scale, humans have always lived at the whim of an unpredictable planet. For decades, paleoclimatologists have been using tree rings, ice cores, lakebed sediments, and other natural records to reconstruct ancient climates, revealing a dynamic tapestry of global weather patterns through time. This has allowed archaeologists, paleontologists, and others concerned with understanding the past to place historical events within their climatic context, notably implicating climate change as having helped to drive the Neolithic shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, the rise and fall of civilizations, and megafaunal extinctions.
Recently, this alliance between archaeology and paleoclimatology has welcomed genomics into the fold, with the emergence of studies that incorporate all three. As any single kind of historical record is incomplete at best and misleading at worst, such interdisciplinary collaboration strengthens our ability to make inferences about the past. Whole genome sequencing, ancient DNA extraction technologies, and population genetics methods allow us to not only study the demographic history of humans using modern and ancient human DNA, but also many aspects of their behavior and culture by exploring their biotic environments. Two studies published in 2020 used non-human genomes to show long-lasting effects of ancient climate change on human societies in different parts of eastern Asia.
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