  As an important symbol of civilization and culture, architectures originally
were built for sheltering human beings from weather disasters and therefore
should be affected by climate change, particularly the associated change in the
occurrence of extreme weather events. However, although meteorology has been
considered as a factor in modern architecture design, it remains unclear
whether and how the ancients adapted to climate change from the perspective of
architecture design, particularly on a millennium time scale. Here we show that
the periodic change and trend of the roof slope of ancient architectures in
northern China clearly demonstrate the climate change adaptation over the past
thousand years. We show that the snowfall fluctuation caused by the
paleo-climate change was an essential driving factor within the roof
modification process of ancient Chinese timber architecture. Our study
indicates that climate change may act as a much more important factor on human
behaviour than we ever thought.
