On-site, subannual climate records decouple Neolithic expansion from climate instability.

On-site mollusk temperature archives show no winter cooling of the magnitude proposed for 8600–8000 years ago, and no strong link between climate and subsistence in early farming contexts.

• Why it matters: The key gap is that long-term climate records have been hard to reconcile with local, short-term extremes that could plausibly affect prehistoric decisions and farming outcomes.
• What they did: The team used the largest dataset of high-resolution temperature archives in mollusks to statistically test whether early farmers faced extreme cold-events that would reduce harvest yields, using paleotemperature and subsistence data from the same archaeological contexts.
• The result: The direct local comparison finds no immediate evidence for the hypothesized extreme cold impact and implies that the proposed climate-driven standstill is not supported at the site level.

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