Climate Change and Human Adaptation: Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Resilience

Anthropogenic climate change presents an existential challenge to humanity. While modern data provides critical short-term insights, deep historical perspectives are essential for understanding long-term human-environment dynamics. Bioarchaeology, which integrates biological and contextual data from human skeletal remains, offers a unique and powerful lens to examine how past populations perceived, responded to, and were shaped by environmental shifts over centuries and millennia. This field provides direct evidence of lived experience, health, and adaptation that complements archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets. The integration of these data into prediction and planning efforts will be critical for creating an ethical environmental justice movement in a warmer world.

This Research Topic aims to establish and showcase the "Human Bioarchaeology of Climate Change" as a critical paradigm. We seek to compile high-resolution case studies that move beyond correlation to causation, explicitly linking paleoclimatic data with embodied human experience as recorded in the skeleton. Our goal is to synthesize global evidence for the mechanisms of adaptation—biological, social, and technological—and to interrogate the factors that led to resilient or vulnerable outcomes. This collection will create a foundational text that provides an evidence-based, deep-time context for contemporary policy debates on climate justice, sustainability, and the human dimensions of environmental change.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that integrate bioarchaeological data (e.g., skeletal stress indicators, isotopic analyses for diet and migration, paleopathological lesions) with high-resolution paleoclimatic and archaeological records. We encourage submissions of Original Research, Reviews, Methods, and Perspectives papers addressing themes including, but not limited to:

Embodied Inequality: Analyses of how climate change differentially impacted health and mortality across social segments (e.g., by sex, age, status), using skeletal stress markers.

Biocultural Adaptations: Examinations of how technological and subsistence shifts (e.g., agricultural changes, resource intensification) manifested in human biology (e.g., isotopic signatures, osteoarthritis, dental wear).

Mobility and Displacement: Studies using isotopic and morphological evidence to track migration and mobility driven by climatic events and its health outcomes.

Conflict and Cooperation: Investigations into how environmental stress influenced interpersonal violence, social conflict, or community support, as evidenced by trauma.

Methodological Innovation: Papers presenting novel methods for robustly correlating isotopic, osteological, and climatic datasets.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: climate change, bioarchaeology, migration, human adaptation, resilience, vulnerability, paleodiet, human paleopathology, social inequality, sustainability, isotopes

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.