An international team of researchers has shown that old wives' tales that snails² can tell us about the weather should not be dismissed too hastily（匆忙地）. While the story goes that if a snail¹ climbs a plant or post, rain is coming, research led by the University of York goes one better: it shows snails can provide a wealth of information about the prevailing³ weather conditions thousands of years ago.

 

The researchers, including scientists from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC), analysed the chemistry of snail shells dating back 9,000 to 2,500 years recovered from Mediterranean⁴ caves, looking at humidity at different times in the past.

 

Their findings, which are reported in the journal Quaternary International, reveal that when the first farmers arrived in Italy and Spain, the western Mediterranean was not the hot dry place it is now, but warmer, wetter and stickier.

 

The research was led by Dr André Carlo Colonese from York's Department of Archaeology⁵.

 

Dr Colonese and his co-authors believe that land snails have great potential as a source of information about human behaviour and palaeoclimatic（古气候的） conditions and therefore should be given much more attention.

 

Dr Colonese, an EU Marie Curie Fellow in York's Centre for Human Palaeoecology & Evolutionary⁶ Origins, said: "By putting together research on snails from multiple sites across Spain and Italy, we were able to produce a large scale regional picture for weather conditions over the western Mediterranean area.

 

"This allowed us to observe differences in climate across the region. Interestingly, when compared with previous studies, we found that while conditions on the Atlantic coast of northern Spain were probably much like those of today, on the Mediterranean side in locations such as southern Spain and Sicily, conditions were much more humid."

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