Holocene environment and biota

Floral change

The most important biological means of establishing Holocene climate involves palynology, the study of pollen, spores, and other microscopic organic particles. Pollen from trees, shrubs, or grasses is generated annually in large quantities and often is well preserved in fine-grained lake, swamp, or marine sediments. Statistical correlations of modern and fossil assemblages provide a basis for estimating the approximate makeup of the local or regional vegetation through time. Even a crude subdivision into arboreal pollen (AP) and nonarboreal pollen (NAP) reflects the former types of climate. The tundra vegetation of the last glacial epoch, for example, provides predominantly NAP, and the transition to forest vegetation shows the climatic amelioration that heralded the beginning of the Holocene.

The first standard palynological stratigraphy was developed in Scandinavia by Axel Blytt, Johan Rutger Sernander, and E.J. Lennart von Post, in combination with a theory of Holocene climate changes. The so-called Blytt–Sernander system was soon tied to the archaeology and to the varve chronology of Gerard De Geer. It has been closely checked by radiocarbon dating, establishing a very useful standard. Every region has its own standard pollen stratigraphy, but these are now correlated approximately with the Blytt–Sernander framework. To some extent this is even true for remote areas such as Patagonia and East Africa. Particularly important is the fact that the middle Holocene was appreciably warmer than today. In Europe this phase has been called the Climatic Optimum (zones Boreal to Atlantic), and in North America it has been called the hypsithermal (also altithermal and xerothermic).

Like pollen, macrobotanical remains by themselves do not establish chronologies. Absolute dating of these remains does, however, provide a chronology of floral changes throughout the Holocene. Recent discoveries of the dung deposits of Pleistocene animals in dry caves and alcoves on the Colorado Plateau, including those of mammoth, bison, horse, sloth, extinct forms of mountain goats, and shrub oxen, have provided floristic assemblages from which temperature and moisture requirements for such assemblages can be deduced in order to develop paleoenvironmental reconstructions tied to an absolute chronology. Macrobotanical remains found in the digestive tracts of late Pleistocene animals frozen in the permafrost regions of Siberia and Alaska also have made it possible to build paleoenvironmental reconstructions tied to absolute chronologies.

From these reconstructions, one can see warming and drying trends in the terminal Pleistocene (± 11,500 bp). Cold-tolerant, water-loving plants (e.g., birch and spruce) retreated to higher elevations or higher latitudes (as much as 2,500 metres in elevation) within less than 11,000 years.

Detailed studies of late Pleistocene and Holocene alluvium, tied to carbon-14 chronology, have provided evidence of cyclic fluctuations in the aggradation and degradation of Holocene drainage systems. Although it is still too early in the analysis to state with certainty, it appears from the work of several investigators that there is a regional, or semicontinental cycle, of erosion and deposition that occurs every 250–300, 500–600, 1,000–1,300, and possibly 6,000 years within the Holocene.

Faunal change

According to an analysis of multiple carbon-dated sites conducted in 1984 by James I. Mead and David J. Meltzer, 75 percent of the larger animals (those of more than 40 kilograms live weight) that became extinct during the late Pleistocene did so by about 10,800 to 10,000 years ago. Whether the cause of this decimation of Pleistocene fauna was climatic or cultural has been debated ever since another American investigator, Paul S. Martin, proposed the overkill hypothesis in the 1960s. Since then, other hypotheses for the late Pleistocene extinctions, such as those involving climatic changes or disease outbreaks, have emerged. Whatever the case, most geologists and paleontologists designate the beginning of a new epoch—the Holocene—at approximately 11,700 years ago, a time coincident with the sudden ending of the Younger Dryas cool phase.

Floral and faunal reconstructions tied to the physical evidence of fluvial, alluvial, and lacustrine sediments and to a radiocarbon chronology reflect a warming and drying trend (as contrasted with the Pleistocene) during the last 10,000 years. The drying trend apparently reached its peak about 5,500 to 7,500 years ago (referred to as Antev’s Altithermal) and has ranged between that peak and the cold, wet conditions of the early Holocene since that time.

Nonmarine Holocene sediments are usually discontinuous, making exact correlations difficult. An absolute chronology provided by radiocarbon dating permits temporal correlation, even if the deposits are discontinuous or physically different. Analysis of Holocene deposits requires chronostratigraphic correlations of discontinuous and dissimilar deposits to allow an interpretation of local, regional, continental, and global conditions.

Analysis of microfauna from paleontological and archaeological sites of the late Pleistocene and Holocene of North America has aided in paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Micromammals (rodents and insectivores), as well as amphibians and insects, are paleoecologically sensitive. Comparisons of modern habitat and range of species to late Pleistocene and Holocene assemblages and distributions reveal disharmonious associations (i.e., the occurrence of presently allopatric taxa that are presumed to be ecologically incompatible), especially in late Pleistocene assemblages. Tentative conclusions from micromammals and other environmental indicators suggest that the late Pleistocene supported an environment in which there coexisted plants and animals that are today separated by hundreds to thousands of kilometres (or considerable elevation differences). Stated in another way, the late Pleistocene climate was more equable than that of the present day, one in which seasonal extremes in temperature and effective moisture were reduced. The evolution of a modern biotic community, as opposed to one of the late Pleistocene, appears to be the consequence of intricate biological and biophysical interactions among individual species. Some researchers have theorized that the environmental changes that led to the formation of new biotic communities at the end of the Pleistocene resulted in the extinction of many of the Pleistocene faunal forms.