Capturing climate variability during our ancestors' earliest days

摘要

Climate's role in shaping the environmental and evolutionary history of our earliest ancestors remains an actively debated topic. In PNAS, Magill et al. (1, 2) present records of terrestrial habitat and hydro-climate variation and pacing from Olduvai Gorge sediments during a key interval of our ancestors' divergence and dispersal approximately 2.0 Ma. Although there is general consensus that ecosystem variability shaped resource and landscape distributions on the East African landscape, causing changes in early Homo foraging strategies and diet (3-5), the temporal linkages between climate and environmental changes and hominin evolution remain far more contentious (6). Here, Magill et al.