Title: Climate and human evolution | NOAA Climate.gov
Headings: Climate and human evolution
Climate and human evolution
Climate.gov: What is variability selection?
Climate.gov: How does variability selection explain human evolution better than other hypotheses?
Climate.gov: When and how did you conceive of variability selection?
Climate.gov: What evidence shows increasing climate variability over the past several million years?
Climate.gov: Can you give some examples of other species beside humans that have undergone variability selection?
Climate.gov: How can an organism with a lifetime of 40 years “sense” or adapt to a change that is occurring over the span of thousands of years?
Climate.gov: How has variability selection been received by other anthropologists?
Climate.gov: How is future climate change likely to affect human evolution?
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Content: As I worked there, walking up and down the hillsides, studying the sediments, I saw in the rock record the presence of a large lake stretching across the basin. Then the lake was gone, then a volcanic eruption disrupted the environment that had been there, then the lake was back, followed by a severe drought, then the lake was back again. This excavated pit shows different sediment layers at Sediment layers from Olorgesailie. Image courtesy Smithsonian Institution. So it was clear the environment changed substantially and repeatedly over this million-year period. It wasn’t a stable environment, and it wasn’t a trend in one direction. I also saw, over the first couple years of research there, that the dominant mammals preserved as fossils—zebras, elephants, pigs—were specialized grazing animals of the savanna, well adapted to a grassland environment. But they went extinct about a half a million years ago. They were survived by relatives that were smaller and capable of changing their diet. The more adaptable animal lineages were able to survive while their specialized relatives became extinct.