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Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India

An unresolved issue in the vegetation ecology of the Indian subcontinent is whether its savannas, characterized by relatively open formations of deciduous trees in C(4)-grass dominated understories, are natural or anthropogenic. Historically, these ecosystems have widely been regarded as anthropogen...

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Autores principales: Riedel, Nils, Fuller, Dorian Q., Marwan, Norbert, Poretschkin, Constantin, Basavaiah, Nathani, Menzel, Philip, Ratnam, Jayashree, Prasad, Sushma, Sachse, Dirk, Sankaran, Mahesh, Sarkar, Saswati, Stebich, Martina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8079367/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33907218
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88550-8
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author Riedel, Nils
Fuller, Dorian Q.
Marwan, Norbert
Poretschkin, Constantin
Basavaiah, Nathani
Menzel, Philip
Ratnam, Jayashree
Prasad, Sushma
Sachse, Dirk
Sankaran, Mahesh
Sarkar, Saswati
Stebich, Martina
author_facet Riedel, Nils
Fuller, Dorian Q.
Marwan, Norbert
Poretschkin, Constantin
Basavaiah, Nathani
Menzel, Philip
Ratnam, Jayashree
Prasad, Sushma
Sachse, Dirk
Sankaran, Mahesh
Sarkar, Saswati
Stebich, Martina
author_sort Riedel, Nils
collection PubMed
description An unresolved issue in the vegetation ecology of the Indian subcontinent is whether its savannas, characterized by relatively open formations of deciduous trees in C(4)-grass dominated understories, are natural or anthropogenic. Historically, these ecosystems have widely been regarded as anthropogenic-derived, degraded descendants of deciduous forests. Despite recent work showing that modern savannas in the subcontinent fall within established bioclimatic envelopes of extant savannas elsewhere, the debate persists, at least in part because the regions where savannas occur also have a long history of human presence and habitat modification. Here we show for the first time, using multiple proxies for vegetation, climate and disturbances from high-resolution, well-dated lake sediments from Lonar Crater in peninsular India, that neither anthropogenic impact nor fire regime shifts, but monsoon weakening during the past ~ 6.0 kyr cal. BP, drove the expansion of savanna at the expense of forests in peninsular India. Our results provide unambiguous evidence for a climate-induced origin and spread of the modern savannas of peninsular India at around the mid-Holocene. We further propose that this savannization preceded and drove the introduction of agriculture and development of sedentism in this region, rather than vice-versa as has often been assumed.
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spelling pubmed-80793672021-04-28 Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India Riedel, Nils Fuller, Dorian Q. Marwan, Norbert Poretschkin, Constantin Basavaiah, Nathani Menzel, Philip Ratnam, Jayashree Prasad, Sushma Sachse, Dirk Sankaran, Mahesh Sarkar, Saswati Stebich, Martina Sci Rep Article An unresolved issue in the vegetation ecology of the Indian subcontinent is whether its savannas, characterized by relatively open formations of deciduous trees in C(4)-grass dominated understories, are natural or anthropogenic. Historically, these ecosystems have widely been regarded as anthropogenic-derived, degraded descendants of deciduous forests. Despite recent work showing that modern savannas in the subcontinent fall within established bioclimatic envelopes of extant savannas elsewhere, the debate persists, at least in part because the regions where savannas occur also have a long history of human presence and habitat modification. Here we show for the first time, using multiple proxies for vegetation, climate and disturbances from high-resolution, well-dated lake sediments from Lonar Crater in peninsular India, that neither anthropogenic impact nor fire regime shifts, but monsoon weakening during the past ~ 6.0 kyr cal. BP, drove the expansion of savanna at the expense of forests in peninsular India. Our results provide unambiguous evidence for a climate-induced origin and spread of the modern savannas of peninsular India at around the mid-Holocene. We further propose that this savannization preceded and drove the introduction of agriculture and development of sedentism in this region, rather than vice-versa as has often been assumed. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-04-27 /pmc/articles/PMC8079367/ /pubmed/33907218 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88550-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Riedel, Nils
Fuller, Dorian Q.
Marwan, Norbert
Poretschkin, Constantin
Basavaiah, Nathani
Menzel, Philip
Ratnam, Jayashree
Prasad, Sushma
Sachse, Dirk
Sankaran, Mahesh
Sarkar, Saswati
Stebich, Martina
Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India
title Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India
title_full Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India
title_fullStr Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India
title_full_unstemmed Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India
title_short Monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular India
title_sort monsoon forced evolution of savanna and the spread of agro-pastoralism in peninsular india
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8079367/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33907218
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88550-8
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