The Corridor of Disks, El Castillo Cave, Cantabria, Spain. The disks have been dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.
Urban heat, ancient cave art, bold birds
3 July 2012
This week in the Planet Earth Podcast: a look at how urban heat islands will alter under climate change, and how these changes might affect your health, as well as our railways, roads and energy supplies. Also: why Europe's oldest cave art might not have been painted by humans at all.
With temperatures in some regions expected to soar under climate change, scientists, businesses and town planners are asking how that might affect the well-known urban heat island effect. Will it get worse? And if it does, how will we adapt? Sue Nelson goes to Birmingham University to meet urban meteorologist Catherine Muller to find out.
Later, Richard Hollingham talks to archaeologist Alistair Pike from Bristol University to find out about the likely creators of red discs, hand stencils and club-like symbols in a cave in northern Spain, some of which Alistair and his team have established are at least 40,800 years old.
Listen
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A full text transcript is available.
Finally, how Gouldian finches' personalities depend on the colour of their heads, carnivorous plants going veggie, and dairy farming in the Sahara 7000 years ago.
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Keywords:
Adaptation & mitigation,
Anthropology,
Environmental change,
Europe,
Human health,
UK,
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