And all of this before the One-Nutters / Rusty Dongers told us all about the Man-Made CO2 BS.
DEPARTMENT OF ATMOSPHERIC AND CLIMATE SCIENCE
Climate and American People.
The effect of climate on human settlement of America continued into medieval times. The first Europeans to set foot on America were Vikings who settled Greenland under the leadership of Eric the Red in about 1000AD. His son, Leif Erikson, led an expedition to colonize America that probably settled in Newfoundland. The colony in Greenland was abandoned in about 1400AD when cooler temperatures associated with the Little Ice Age made farming there too difficult. Well before this time the earlier Asian immigrants to America had developed civilizations, but continued to be affected by changing climate. The Anasazi people of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest are an interesting example of how climate can affect a people. They had an economy centred around corn farming, and built large dwellings in river valleys and along the ridges between canyons. The most famous of these are the cliff dwellings and pueblos of the Mesa Verde region near the junction of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. This region experienced a series of profound droughts beginning about 1150AD, and by 1300AD a large area in the Mesa Verde region was abandoned.
The oldest confirmed evidence of human habitation in America dates from about 11,500 years ago. These people were big game hunters, and their camps are marked by distinctive fluted spear points. They hunted mastodons, extinct relatives of the modern elephant, and shared the land with sabre-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and a variety of other now-extinct species. The mastodon, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and sabre-toothed cat all became extinct about 10,000 years ago. Some argue that efficient human hunters caused these extinctions, but others believe that environmental change was the key factor. Enormous changes in the global climate were occurring about 10,000 years ago. The great North American ice sheets began to melt rapidly about 14,000 years ago and by 7,000 years ago they were gone. As the glaciers melted the summers became much warmer, creating very different conditions for plants and animals. Spruce trees, which like colder climates, retreated northward by about a thousand miles, giving way to grassland and broadleaf trees. Many large mammals like the Mastodon that preferred cold climates were not able to adjust to these changes. The climate warming and melting of the ice sheets caused other dramatic changes in North America. The Great Basin between the Cascade Range and Rocky Mountains now has a dry climate, but during the ice age it was a wetter place. About 15,000 years ago the Great Salt Lake in Utah was about 1,200 feet deeper and covered an area about the size of Lake Michigan. As the ice melted and the climate warmed, the west became the relatively dry region we know today. The effect of climate on human settlement of America continued into medieval times...
The first Europeans to set foot on America were Vikings who settled Greenland under the leadership of Eric the Red in about 1000AD. His son, Leif Erikson, led an expedition to colonize America that probably settled in Newfoundland. The colony in Greenland was abandoned in about 1400AD when cooler temperatures associated with the Little Ice Age made farming there too difficult. Well before this time the earlier Asian immigrants to America had developed civilizations, but continued to be affected by changing climate. The Anasazi people of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest are an interesting example of how climate can affect a people. They had an economy centred around corn farming, and built large dwellings in river valleys and along the ridges between canyons. The most famous of these are the cliff dwellings and pueblos of the Mesa Verde region near the junction of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. This region experienced a series of profound droughts beginning about 1150AD, and by 1300AD a large area in the Mesa Verde region was abandoned.
