Climate Change and Human Evolution

摘要

Climate and biological evolution have interacted throughout Earth's history, together creating many small and a few major transformations in the planet's atmosphere and biota. The role of climate in the origin and adaptations of humans relates not only to our past but also, potentially, to our future (1). A number of hypotheses propose that climate-driven environmental changes during the past 7 million years were responsible for hominin speciation, the morphological shift to bipedality, enlarged cranial capacity, behavioral adaptability, cultural innovations, and intercontinental immigration events (2-9). These hypotheses are based on correlations between global-scale climate shifts documented in oceanic deposits and events in hominin evolution recorded in continental fossil-bearing strata. Establishing cause-effect relationships between climate and human evolution is tantalizing but presents many challenges for paleoanthropology and the geological sciences.