The Oligocene to the Quaternary: climate and biology - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 186

a region south of the Himalaya mountains range, likely eastern India, Myanmar and
Thailand, whereas O. sativa japonica was domesticated from wild rice in southern
China. Turning to archaeological evidence, the first use of rice took place in east-
ern China in lowland swamps. Pollen, algal, fungal spore and micro-charcoal data
from sediments suggest that Neolithic communities used fire to clear alder ( Alnus
spp.)-dominated wetland scrub to prepare sites for rice cultivation 7700 years ago,
although other evidence indicates earlier use of rice in the region before 9000 years ago
(Zong et al., 2007).
The Neolithic agricultural revolution was not confined to plant species. The earliest
evidence (dated fatty deposits in pottery remains) of milk in the Near East and
south-eastern Europe was provided by an international team of researchers; led by
Richard Evershed and Sebastian Payne in 2008. They showed that milk was in use by
6500 years ago (some 2000 years earlier than was previously thought).
The Neolithic agricultural revolution was for humans a successful event conferring
stability to human populations and allowing them to increase in size. But a subsequent
population-increasing event was to come.
Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th-century human population has shown
a further marked increase. The global population has been estimated to have been
around 425 million in the year 1500 and 600 million in 1700. But from then it
grew to 4430 million by 1980, an increase of nearly 640% (see Chapter 7). Com-
mensurately, the 1700-1980 increases in cropland were over 466%, or 1.2 billion
ha, whereas the larger area of forest and woodland worldwide declined by 18.7%.
As we shall see, this will impede natural ecosystem adaptation to climate change.
During this time agricultural efficiency increased, which is why the growth in agri-
cultural lands was somewhat less than the growth in population. (As we shall see in
Chapter 7, increasing direct and indirect energy inputs largely drove the improved
agricultural productivity.) But it was the Industrial Revolution that was to spark
the major human impacts on climate change that concern us today. The Industrial
Revolution began in the latter half of the Little Ice Age and both these events
begin our examination of the present climate and biological change in the next
chapter.
4.7 Summary
The past glacial and the current interglacial have seen much biological change, which
again clearly demonstrates that biology and climate are interrelated. Of relevance
to readers, the past glacial-interglacial cycle also influenced the evolution that saw
the spread and (with the comparatively stable Holocene interglacial) the expansion
in numbers of modern humans. That humans have had a profound effect on ecology
in various parts of the planet is most germane to present climate change, which has
an increasingly anthropogenic component to it. That the climate has been warmer -
marginally at times during this and previous interglacials and markedly before the
Quaternary - provides palaeo-analogues from which lessons can be learned as the