Anthropologists, geographers and earth scientists look to the past to assess how different cultures have — and will — adapt to global warming.

Yes, say an international team of anthropologists, geographers and earth scientists in Canada, the U.S. and France led by Universite de Montreal anthropologist Ariane Burke.

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Burke and her colleagues make a case for a new and evolving discipline called «the archeology of climate change.»

It’s an interdisciplinary science that uses data from archeological digs and the palaeoclimate record to study how humans interacted with their environment during past climate-change events such as the warming that followed the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

What the scientists hope to identify are the tipping points in climate history that prompted people to reorganize their societies to survive, showing how cultural diversity, a source of human resilience in the past, is just as important today as a bulwark against global warming.

«The archaeology of climate change combines the study of environmental conditions and archaeological information,» said Burke, who runs the Hominin Dispersals Research Group and the Ecomorphology and Paleoanthropology Laboratory.

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