Abstract:

Since ancient times, climate change, especially periodic oscillation, has profoundly affected the transformation and development of human society. Periodic climate change left its imprints in the origins and migration of humans in the Paleolithic Age, the evolution of culture and civilization in the Neolithic Age, the rise and fall of dynasties in historical periods, the socio-economic turmoils in the era of industrialization, and all other anthropological issues. On the basis of new evidence and progresses in paleoclimatology, paleoanthropology, and environmental archaeology in recent years, this paper examines climatic characteristics at various development stages and key nodes of human society from the perspective of periodic climate change. Using typical study cases, it introduces and analyzes the complex interaction between periodic climate change and human activities at different temporal and spatial scales in the Paleolithic, Neolithic and historical periods, involving the link of periodic climate change to human evolution and migration during the Paleolithic Age, the association of periodic climate change with cultural succession as well as the origin and development of agriculture during the Neolithic Age, complex relationship between periodic climate change and human activities since the historical period, and new viewpoints on the mechanisms of periodic climate change and human social adaptability; it also discusses the similarities and differences between natural and social sciences in understanding the mechanisms underlying the relationship of climate change to human activities, and expounds a new paradigm to study of the relationship between climate change and human activities under the background of interdisciplinary research.

This new research paradigm involves progresses and breakthroughs in theories, methods, technologies, and applications of climate change and social-cultural development. The following aspects thus must be considered in future studies: 1) transforming the traditional and scattered evidence of qualitative description into continuous temporal-spatial sequences of quantitative parameters (e,g., rate of change, speed, amplitude, threshold) and, and taking into account the multi-source, multi-scale, high-dimensional and complex spatio-temporal dependence of data; 2) merging the case study into the statistical test of big data, and distinguishing the climate-culture phenomena and nodes associated with periodic changes and event superpositions at different time scales through statistical methods such as Bayesian probability and probability inference; 3) carrying out systematical studies on the representative signs of cultures and their quantitative methods in different scenes of history and prehistoric periods, and establishing linear-nonlinear relationships models among human activities, cultural changes, and variations of temperature, precipitation and ecological environment; and 4) having a clear understanding that the studies of paleoclimate changes are providing evidence of multi-layered interaction for the study of earth system science together with the studies of archaeological culture instead of just serving for interpreting past human activities.

Key words: climate change, periodically, human activities, cultural succession, Interdisciplinarity, human-environment interaction