Did Climate Effect Human Evolution

These drastic transformations in the planets atmosphere start been the impetus of evolution among species and has sparked bear on to geologist and paleoanthropologist for historic period, resulting in a number of hypothesis that propose that clime-driven environsal changes during the gone 7 million years were esponsible for hominin speciation, the morphological shift to bipedality, enlarged cranial capacity, and behavioral adaptability (Behrensmeyer 476). For this opening to be properly back up, the antecedent question that postulate to be identified is, do species adapt to change?Naturalist and geologist, Charles Darwin, supported this idea, stating that living things adapt toa place- a habitat Ooyce 1). He ex campaigned this theory through the idea that animals and various primates partake in the exemplify of natural selection. In 1997, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supported Darwins heory by gathering a research team together and running a serious of studies that demonstrated that animals can adapt to sudden changes in their environment with surprising speed (Dybas, Chery 1). Researchers Frank Shaw and Ruth Shaw of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, and F.Helen Rodd of the University of California used high-risk guppies from the West Indies island of Trinidad and institute that fish that were moved from a predator-infested pool to a pool with Just one predator grew larger, lived longer and produced fewer besides larger offspring. In the span of seven to 8 generationsbetween quartet and 1 1 yearsthey became much like the native guppies in the relatively predator-free environment (Dybas, Chery 1). Although studies such as the one above indicates that species do indeed adapt to different environments, there still lies the question of if mode and evolution correlate.Anthropologist Rick Potts challenged this question. For many years, Potts has been pushing the idea that climate do us and that habitats kept changing because climates ke pt changing Ooyce 1). For scientist to gain more knowledge and research n this idea, they need to get a brimful climate history in places where human ancestors lived. Which, in this case, would be in vitamin E Africa. The pulsed climate variability hypothesis states that about every 20,000 years ago, the region vacillated between very dry and very wet periods (Ferro 1).These uttermost(a) changes may have played a vital role in driving human evolution and researchers like Rick Potts and Mark Maslin guess and gather sediments from East African lakes by drilling into lake bottoms and retrieving tubes of muck that study millions of years of climate history anging from the fossils of the plant pollen and the organisms that lived in the lakes that respond to climate, to the chemical science of the sediments that also can give us very detailed breeding about changes in temperature and precipitation Ooyce 1).By collecting these tubes of muck, scientists can compare climate timelines to the fossil records ot our ancestors to see now climate attected evolution. Mark Maslin, who mainly focussed on the findings form an East African Rift Valley, compared all the lakes that were cognize to have existed in the East African area over the delay 5 million ears with climate and human evolution records. Maslin findings were that events such as when humans first reincarnated out of East Africa, all happened during the wetter periods found on the climate records.Major events in human history, including when humans first started to reincarnate out of East Africa, happened during wetter periods. It was found that the appearance of early military man erectus correlates to when a number of deep freshwater lakes appeared. In a press statement, Maslin explained that our ancestors had to deal with rapid switching from famine to feast and back again. This, he says, was what drove the evolution of new species with bigger brains, and later forced them to migrate out of East Afric a, moving down toward South Africa and north to atomic number 63 and Asia (Ferro 1).By having these freshwater lakes that create lush vegetation, early humans would have been a lot forced to migrate for the search of food water. Evaluations on lake sediment do it clear that East African lakes did in fact play a major role in the explanation of why and when hominin species migrated out of East Africa but after much speculation, it seems as though we may have to consider that climate was not lways the underlying cause and that intrinsic accessible factors and interspecies competition may have play a prodigious role (Ferro 1).