Migration and Climate Change

1Migration and Creativity: What Roles do They Play During Climate Change?

1.1. A necessary evil

Understanding climate change, as a global phenomenon, involves referring to history in order to grasp its consequences in the present. Contemporary paleoanthropology advances creativity as a decisive characteristic in the hominization process. Paleoanthropologists, like Yves Coppens, have highlighted the role of creativity in the development of the genus Homo in the face of the many climate changes of the Quaternary. A significant climate volatility, that of the Ice Ages, contributed to the formation of human cultures, which were capable of better adaptive properties than natural selection alone.

This raises questions about the possible interactions between climate volatility and major transformations of cultures and religions. The methodological challenge is that of a global history that can reconcile the concerns of the present with questions about the emergence of human cultures. The developer of the idea of the greenhouse effect, Joseph Fourier, was in the audience of Auguste Comte’s first class, developer of a cultural evolutionism based on three states of human thought. The theory proposed by Comte was that of cultures that are first fetishist, then metaphysical and finally positivist. The concerns of that present time were then those of distinguishing oneself from the previous century, that of the Enlightenment, described as “metaphysical”. A few years later, Boucher de Perthes ...