New research from an international team is published in the journal Scienceshows that the first human species were able to adapt to a variety of landscapes and food sources. This adaptability could have strengthened our ancestors’ resilience to historical climate change.

our kind Homo evolved over the last 3 million years – a period of increased hot/cold climate fluctuations. The mystery of how early human species adapted to these extreme climatic conditions, ice ages, and large-scale changes in land and vegetation continues to baffle scientists.

Did our ancestors adapt to local environmental changes over time, or did they seek more stable environments with a variety of food sources? Was our human evolution more influenced by temporal changes in climate or by the spatial nature of the environment?

To quantitatively test these fundamental hypotheses about human evolution and adaptation, the research team assembled a collection of more than three thousand well-dated human fossil specimens and archaeological sites representing six different human species, along with realistic climate model simulations and vegetation covering the last three. used compilation. million years. The scientists focused their analysis on biomes, which are geographic regions characterized by similar climates, plant and animal communities (such as savanna, rainforest, or tundra).

“For the archaeological and anthropological sites and the ages involved, we inferred local biome types from our climate vegetation model. This showed which biomes the extinct hominin species preferred. H. ergaster, H. habilis, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis And H. neanderthalensis, And ours direct ancestors – H. sapiens. “, said Elke Zeller, Ph.D. student at the IBS Center for Climate Physics, Pusan ​​National University, South Korea, and lead author of the study.

Chronology of humanoid evolution and adaptation to different vegetation types. Adaptation played a key role in the geographic spread of our Homo genus, according to a new scientific study. Author: Elke Zeller. This work includes adapted images from HCRP-UR501 and Sangiran 17 from Gerbil, Bodo from Ryan Somma, and Daka Homo from Cretan, used under CC BY 3.0 and DNH-134 from Herries, AIR et al. Science 2020.

According to their analysis, the scientists found that earlier African groups preferred to live in open environments such as grasslands and dry bushes. Hommines that migrated to Eurasia about 1.8 million years ago, for example H. erectus and then H. heidelbergensis And H. neanderthalensis has developed a higher tolerance for other biomes, including temperate and boreal forests, over time. “In order to survive as forest dwellers, these groups evolved more sophisticated stone tools and possibly social skills,” said Professor Pasquale Raia of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, co-author of the study. Finally, H. sapiens It originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago and has quickly become a part of all trades. Mobile, resilient and competitive, our direct ancestors survived in harsh environments such as deserts and tundra, unlike other earlier species.

In further study of the landscape’s best features, the scientists found a significant cluster of early human habitation in areas with increased biome diversity. “This means that our ancestors enjoyed mosaic landscapes close to a wide variety of plant and animal sources,” said Professor Axel Timmermann, co-author of the study and director of the IBS Climate Center. Physics in South Korea. The results show that ecosystem diversity plays a key role in human evolution.

The authors first demonstrated this preference for mosaic landscapes on a continental scale and proposed a new proposal. diversity selection hypothesis: species Homo and H. sapiens, in particular, it was uniquely equipped to take advantage of heterogeneous biomes.

“Our analysis demonstrates the vital importance of landscape and plant diversity as a selection factor for humans and a potential driver of socio-cultural development,” adds Elke Zeller. Finding out how changing vegetation shapes human existence is new. scientific The research provides unprecedented insight into human prehistory and survival strategies.

The simulation of the climate and vegetation model covering the last 3 million years of Earth’s history was performed on Aleph, one of South Korea’s fastest scientific supercomputers. “Supercomputers are now becoming an important tool in evolutionary biology and anthropology,” said Axel Timmermann. Source