That finding comes from a new study that examined the archaeological record in southwestern France, where reindeer became locally extinct during two earlier episodes of warming roughly 10,000 and 130,000 years ago.
"There will be a direct impact of increases in summer temperature on reindeer well-being if global warming is allowed to proceed," said University of Washington archaeologist Donald Grayson, lead author of the study. "The number of southern reindeer will diminish dramatically as their range will move far to the north, and the number of reindeer in the north also will fall greatly."
Grayson and his colleague, Francoise Delpech, a French paleontologist at the Institut de Prehistoire et de Geologie du Quaternaire at the University of Bordeaux, will report their findings in a forthcoming issue of the journal Conservation Biology.
The pair examined the fossil record left in Grotte XVI, a cave above the Ceou River in the Dordogne region of France. The cave, which was occupied by both Neandertal and later Cro-Magnon people, has a very well-dated archaeological sequence from about 40,000 to 12,000 years ago. The sequence actually extends to about 65,000 years ago, but the older dates are less well documented.
Grayson and Delpech correlated the number of reindeer bones found in the cave with summer climate data from previously published paleobotany studies of pollen counts.
"As summer temperatures went up, the number of reindeer went down," said Grayson. "The warmer the summer, the fewer the reindeer. And when the Pleistocene Epoch ended about 10,000 years ago and summer temperatures soared, reindeer disappeared. Sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, reindeer became extinct from higher elevations in southwestern Fr
'"/>
Contact: Joel Schwarz
joels@u.washington.edu
206-543-2580
University of Washington
1-Dec-2004