CCHRI 2026 Annual Colloquium

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland

Climate Change and History Research Initiative 2026 Annual Colloquium

Cultural-biological co-evolution and climate change in the Holocene

15-17 June 2026

Beyond influencing the conditions under which human societies prospered or failed to do so, climate change played a central role in human biological and cultural evolution. Even in the (from an evolutionary perspective) short time-frame of the Holocene (last 12,000 years), humans and the species with which they co-existed changed significantly, in particular with respect to the ecological niches they engineered or occupied. At the same time, human culture has been changing at an accelerating pace over the Holocene, spurring further transformations in human ecology and in human co-dependence with other organisms. At our workshop, we want to combine history, archaeology and the natural sciences to take a broad interdisciplinary look at this process of biological-cultural co-evolution. While we include questions that traditionally come up in discussions of the long-term perspective, such as plant and animal domestication or the formation of languages, we plan to focus in particular on more recent times (the last 3,000 years). We want to see if the dynamic co-existence of humans with other animals, plants, and microbes, under more modern political and economic conditions, led to different types of interactions, more rapid or more abrupt changes, and whether this combination of perspectives can bring us further in understanding the mechanisms underlying the current planetary crisis.