A climate change could have stimulated human evolution
A climate change could have stimulated human evolution
The National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) (Spain) participates in a study that has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), on the progressive desertification of East Africa in the last half million of years and its implications in human evolution. According to the authors, the evidence of a variable and progressively drier climate coincides with an important change in the skills of making lithic tools and the appearance of modern Homo sapiens.
This study, based on cores of lake sediments, 194 m long, collected in Lake Magadi, in southern Kenya, is the first to provide a continuous environmental context of the various archaeological and paleontological remains recovered in the valley basins of the Rift.
"Although the evolution of hominins had already been linked to environmental changes, the nuclei of Lake Magadi provide the first detailed link between climate change and events known from the archaeological record of the region," says Mark Sier, geochronologist and archaeologist from the University of Oxford, who has carried out part of the magnetostratigraphy analysis in the Archeomagnetism laboratory of the CENIEH.
As the main author of the study Richard Owen, of the Baptist University of Hong Kong, explains, there is a great gap in the records between the last tools of the Lower Paleolithic, 500,000 years ago and the appearance of the tools of the Middle Paleolithic, some 320,000 years ago .
Lake Magadi in the rainy station. (Photo: Richard Owen)
"Our results fill that gap with a continuous environmental record in which there was a crucial transition, during which archaeologists have discovered evidence of a leap in the abilities of primitive humans to make, use and exchange stone tools," he says. Owen.
The lithic industry found did not change much between 1.2 million and half a million years; but suddenly, after 500,000 and before 320,000 years, coinciding with the desertification of the region, the tools became more sophisticated and were transported over longer distances.
"Now we can know when the environment changed and then compare that change with the fossil and archeological remains of the region," says Andrew Cohen of the University of Arizona, principal investigator of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) Project. this work is included.
The HSPDP is an international and multidisciplinary macroproject whose objective is to study the relationship between human evolution and climate change through the study of soundings in paleolagos located near the most important archeopaleontological sites in the world. (Source: National Research Center on Human Evolution)
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