Publications by authors named "Poska A"

Article Synopsis
  • The shift from foraging to farming in the ancient Northeast Baltic reveals significant complexities and regional differences that are not fully understood.
  • This study combines multiple scientific analyses to provide a comprehensive view of early farming practices in the 3rd millennium cal BCE, emphasizing the coexistence of different dietary habits among communities.
  • Rather than a straightforward transition to farming, a diverse system emerged with local hunter-gatherers maintaining their lifestyles while newcomers practiced mixed economies, indicating a long-lasting interaction between these groups without full adoption of agriculture.
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The Black Death (1347-1352 CE) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe's population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic's causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, 'big data palaeoecology', which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death's mortality on a regional scale across Europe.

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Article Synopsis
  • Tundra soils hold 50% of global soil organic carbon (SOC), which may decompose due to climate warming, increasing carbon export and contributing to further warming.
  • The study expands the LPJ-GUESS ecosystem model to include processes like DOC production and mineralization, assessing their effects on dissolved organic carbon (DOC) export from the Stordalen catchment in northern Sweden.
  • The model effectively simulates DOC dynamics, showing the importance of water flow and peatland processes, and captures seasonal variations, making it a useful tool for exploring the climate-soil interactions.
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Holocene summer temperature reconstructions from northern Europe based on sedimentary pollen records suggest an onset of peak summer warmth around 9,000 years ago. However, pollen-based temperature reconstructions are largely driven by changes in the proportions of tree taxa, and thus the early-Holocene warming signal may be delayed due to the geographical disequilibrium between climate and tree populations. Here we show that quantitative summer-temperature estimates in northern Europe based on macrofossils of aquatic plants are in many cases ca.

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We present quantitative reconstructions of regional vegetation cover in north-western Europe, western Europe north of the Alps, and eastern Europe for five time windows in the Holocene [around 6k, 3k, 0.5k, 0.2k, and 0.

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