Lower Saxony has a rich heritage of Paleolithic sites preserved in open-air sites and caves. These sediment archives document the advance and retreat of Pleistocene glaciers, as well as periglacial conditions and warm climate periods of the past. This allows the connection between climate change and the associated changes in landscape and ecosystems, as well as the presence of ancient humans, to be clarified.
In our sub-project we are focusing on the paleogenetic component by using ancient DNA from the sediment archives of the sites to carry out paleoenvironmental reconstructions. These are combined with the pollen data from our partner in order to get the most complementary picture possible. In addition, the sediment samples are specifically examined for ancient DNA of hominin origin.
A particularly interesting topic to explore is the role of climate and its influence on early humans in northern Europe, who lived in harsh climates with abrupt changes. Global population distributions in the Late Pleistocene were influenced by orbital-scale climate changes, while sudden millennium-scale events limited their effects to local distributions.
To gain insight into these processes, information about multiple climate parameters at different scales is required. Therefore, in another subproject we rely on paleoclimate model simulations, which are combined using regional climate model simulations, while GCMs (General Circulation Models) provide insights into the mean climate state and large-scale dynamics.