Boreal (age)

It was preceded by the Younger Dryas, the last cold snap of the Pleistocene, and followed by the Atlantic, a warmer and moister period than our most recent climate.

[citation needed] The start of the period is relatively sharply defined by a rise of 7 °C in 50 years in South Greenland.

Similarly, the late Boreal includes the Kilian/Vasset tephra of Swiss and southwest German lakes at 8200 BP, all calibrated.

Studies of bogs in northwest Russia are the basis for a division of the PreBoreal (PB) into PB-1, 10,000–9800, and PB-2, 9800–9300 BP incal.

Before the Pre-Boreal, Eurasia was locked in the chill of the Younger Dryas and was a mostly continuous tundra belt, with regions of taiga, covered with a blanket of grasses, shrubs and other low plants typical of open land.

The blanket teemed with small, rapidly reproducing species, which supported food chains of larger predators.

The sea brought isolation by rising rapidly and many coastal areas becoming flooded and new islands formed.

Those who stayed became hunter-gatherers of the forests and fishers of the numerous bays, inlets and shallow waters around the thousands of islands that now spangled the seas of Europe.

Those who moved east hunted out the last of wild big game and turned their best efforts into learning to herd what was left.

Meanwhile humanity toward the south of the north temperate zone had already turned to food production in a number of widely separated locations and were on the brink of civilization.

The producers tended to live in dense centers without any interest in moving from there except when motivated to find new lands.

Especially sensitive to temperature changes and moving northward almost immediately were Juniperus nana and J. communis, the dwarf and shrub juniper respectively, which reached a maximum density in the Pre-Boreal, before their niches were shaded out.

In the yet warmer early Boreal pollen zone V, Corylus avellana (hazel) and pine expanded into the birch woodlands to such a degree that palynologists refer to the resulting ecology as the hazel-pine forest.

Animals such as Emys orbicularis (European pond tortoise), which require warmer temperatures, were to be found in Denmark.

There an unusual find of net fragments made from plant fibers suggested that fishing was an important part of life.

Localized cultures included the Nieman of Lithuania, the Kunda of Latvia and Estonia, the Azilian of France, and the Epi-Gravettian of Italy.