The Pleistocene-Holocene transition is a very significant period of time, because it marks what I believe is the true foundartions for the origins of civilisation, when we see the first permanent settlements in the Fertile Crescent followed by the onset of agriculture, and from then on humanity has developed exponentially.

From an archaeological point of view, it’s truly a fascinating time period, with so many incredible sites discovered in the past century, from Ancient Jericho in the West Bank, to Mureybet and Tell Qaramel in Syria, and Kortik Tepe, Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Turkey.

The foundations of these sites were laid either just before, during or just after the Younger Dryas cold snap, which, according to platinum spike in the Greenland Ice Core data, began around 12,822 years ago and many parts of the world returned to glacial or near-glacial conditions, a change in climate that lasted around 1,000 or so years.

Not every part of the planet was affected in the same way. In Western Europe and Greenland, the Younger Dryas is a well-defined and synchronous cold period. South America had a less well-defined initiation but a sharp termination. Australia and New Zealand were seemingly unaffected but interestingly, around 100 years or so before the onset of the Younger Dryas as recorded in the Greenland data, Antarctica showed the opposite trend and started to rapidly warm up.

With this in mind, with my personal interest in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, I really wanted to know what was happening in the Fertile Crescent. How did the Younger Dryas affect the climate from Anatolia down to the Levant, the area which really is the true cradle of civilisation? In this video we'll find out!