ABSTRACT
The Younger Dryas has been known since the mid-twentieth century as a distinctive climatic phenomenon of Late Glacial Europe. Efforts to link climate change and culture change are hardly unreasonable, although the initial enthusiasm for a causal relationship often outpaces the empirical evidence linking the two. Cooling during the Younger Dryas Chronozone (YDC) was dominantly a northern hemispheric phenomenon, with severely cold conditions limited to localized, high-latitude regions. In any case, and in regard to YDC climate and climate change, the devil is in the details; and, recent overviews of pollen, chronomid, isotope, ice core, dust and sediment. Other climate proxies have shown that within those broad brush strokes, the climate during the YDC likely varied considerably, even on a sub-continental and regional scale as several of the papers in this volume attest. Younger Dryas climates appear to have been somewhat more complicated in Europe and the Middle East.
