Early Human Habitats Linked to Past Climate Shifts
Published:26 Apr.2022 Source:Institute for Basic Science
By combining the most extensive database of well-dated fossil remains and archeological artefacts with an unprecedented new supercomputer model simulating earth's climate history of the past 2 million years, the team of experts in climate modeling, anthropology and ecology was able to determine under which environmental conditions archaic humans likely lived.
The impact of climate change on human evolution has long been suspected, but has been difficult to demonstrate due to the paucity of climate records near human fossil-bearing sites. To bypass this problem, the team instead investigated what the climate in their computer simulation was like at the times and places humans lived, according to the archeological record. This revealed the preferred environmental conditions of different groups of hominins[1]. From there, the team looked for all the places and times those conditions occurred in the model, creating time-evolving maps of potential hominin habitats.