Did a Chaotic Climate Drive Human Evolution?

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 https://eos.org/articles/did-a-chaotic-climate-drive-human-evolution

By Elise Cutts, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: A new 620,000-year climate record from East Africa reveals dramatic swings between wet and dry conditions that may have influenced human evolution. We owe much of our understanding of the human family tree to decades of fossil finds in East Africa. But whereas researchers know quite a lot about hominin bones, the environments our ancestors and evolutionary cousins inhabited are a different story—despite East Africa’s anthropological significance, climate records for the region have remained stubbornly sparse. Now, researchers have produced what they say is one of the first-ever continuous climate records from a proven habitat of ancient Homo sapiens. The new 620,000-year history of hydroclimate at Chew Bahir, a playa lake in southern Ethiopia, showed that the local climate swung dramatically between wet and dry extremes. Shifts in the intensity and frequency of those swings seem to have occurred alongside, and perhaps even driven, major events in hominin evolution. The results were published in Nature Geoscience.… 

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