The Holocene Climatic Optimum
The warmest stretch of the epoch, with treelines and monsoons far beyond their modern limits.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Between roughly 7000 and 3000 BCE, summer insolation in the Northern Hemisphere runs above present and the mid-latitudes and Arctic are warmer than today, though the tropics generally are not — the warmth is seasonal and regional rather than global in the modern sense. Forests reach further north than they do now, and the Sahara and Arabia are wet. Most of the Neolithic happens inside it.