Timeline of Environmental History - 10th Millennium BC

10th Millennium BC

Year(s) Event(s)
Start End
c. 9700 BC
  • Lake Agassiz reforms from glacial meltwater
  • Bering Sea: Land bridge from Siberia to North America disappears as sea level rises. See Beringia for further information
  • North America: Long Island becomes an island, and not just a terminal moraine, when rising waters break through on the western end to the interior lake
c. 9660 to c. 9600 BC Younger Dryas cold period ends. Pleistocene ends and Holocene begins. Large amounts of previously glaciated land become habitable again. Some sources place the Younger Dryas as stretching from 10,800 BC to 9500 BC. This cool period was possibly caused by a shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation (Gulf Stream/Jet Stream), due to flooding from Lake Agassiz as it reformed.
c. 9500 BC
  • Ancylus Lake, part of the modern-day Baltic Sea, forms.
  • There is evidence of harvesting, though not necessarily cultivation, of wild grasses in Asia Minor about this time.
  • End of the pre-Boreal period of European climate change.
  • Pollen Zone IV Pre-boreal, associated with juniper, willow, birch pollen deposits.
  • Neolithic era begins in Ancient Near East.
  • Evidence of the earliest settlement in Jericho
  • Temporary global chilling, as the Gulf Stream pulls southward, and Europe ices over (1990 Rand McNally Atlas).
  • In Antarctica, long-term melting of the Antarctic ice sheets is commencing.
  • Creosote bush - Larrea tridentata clonal colony, named "King Clone", germinates in the Mojave Desert near the Lucerne Valley in California.
c. 9000 BC First stone structures at Jericho built.

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