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Middle Holocene marine flooding and human response in the south Yangtze coastal plain, East China

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posted on 2018-04-11, 08:22 authored by Zhanghua Wang, David RyvesDavid Ryves, Shao Lei, Xiaomei Nian, Ye Lv, Liang Tang, Long Wang, Jiehua Wang, Jie [Shanghai Museum] Chen
Coastal flooding catastrophes have affected human societies on coastal plains around the world on several occasions in the past, and are threatening 21st century societies under global warming and sea-level rise. However, the role of coastal flooding in the interruption of the Neolithic Liangzhu culture in the lower Yangtze valley, East China coast has been long contested. In this study, we used a well-dated Neolithic site (the Yushan site) close to the present coastline to demonstrate a marine drowning event at the terminal stage of the Liangzhu culture and discuss its linkage to relative sea-level rise. We analysed sedimentology, chronology, organic elemental composition, diatoms and dinoflagellate cysts for several typical profiles at the Yushan site. The field and sedimentary data provided clear evidence of a palaeo-typhoon event that overwhelmed the Yushan site at ∼2560 BCE, which heralded a period of marine inundation and ecological deterioration at the site. We also infer an acceleration in sea-level rise at 2560–2440 BCE from the sedimentary records at Yushan, which explains the widespread signatures of coastal flooding across the south Yangtze coastal plain at that time. The timing of this mid-Holocene coastal flooding coincided with the sudden disappearance of the advanced and widespread Liangzhu culture along the lower Yangtze valley. We infer that extreme events and flooding accompanying accelerated sea-level rise were major causes of vulnerability for prehistoric coastal societies.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41576042).

History

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Quaternary Science Reviews

Volume

187

Pages

80-93

Citation

WANG, Z. ... et al, 2018. Middle Holocene marine flooding and human response in the south Yangtze coastal plain, East China. Quaternary Science Reviews, 187, pp.80-93.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-03-04

Publication date

2018-03-30

Copyright date

2018

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.03.001.

ISSN

0277-3791

Language

  • en

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