The School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences organises a regular series of research seminars throughout the academic year to which everyone is welcome to attend. Speakers - both external and internal to the University - will talk on topics related to all aspects of Earth Sciences.
Today's speaker is Dr Joy Singarayer from the University of Reading.
The first agricultural societies were established around 10,000 years ago and had spread across much of Europe and southern Asia by 5,500 years ago, with resultant anthropogenic deforestation for crop and pasture land.
Here Joyce will consider whether these impacts were large enough to have had a significant impact on global climate through increased anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and biogeophysical changes at the land surface, thousands of years before the industrial era.
She will also ask the question more broadly of when we began to have large-scale influence on climate and environments, which may have occurred even earlier than this, through the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions.