Cultural responses to Climate Change in East Anglia

This project aims to understand the way in which past climate changes influenced the cultural evolution in East Anglia. We expect to reconstruct air temperature and moisture from chemical features kept in the sediments and the farming history and human disease from the genetic signal preserved in the lake. The results will provide select evidence of connections between climate and humans in the past and the possibility to test the shifting natural environment as a selective force in ancient British cultures.
The methods that we will apply are stable fragments of oxygen and carbon as an indicator for air temperature and humidity, and DNA extracted from sediments. The latest is a revolutionary method to get genetic information but not applied at annual resolution so far.