Imagine doing a homework assignment that forced you to leave your computer running for half a year.
That is what a team of scientists at the IBS Center for Climate Physics in South Korea’s Pusan National University did to answer one of science’s most compelling questions: Did climate change affect the evolution of humans?
The half-year of simulation was worth it, though, as the scientists provided the first clear evidence that climate change affected early human evolution and the speciation of the genus Homo.
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The researchers could fast-forward in time through their simulations to create changing maps of potential habitats for each species. They could then see if these were correlated with climate change. The researchers re-ran many analyses using randomly selected groups of fossils. If humans were not affected by climate, each analysis should show similar habitat distributions.
For three human species — H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis and H. heidelbergensis — the researchers found a significant relationship between climate change and population locations…. In a press release, [IBS director Alex] Timmermann said that “this result implies that at least during the past 500 thousand years, the real sequence of past climate change, including glacial cycles, played a central role in determining where different hominin groups lived and where their remains have been found.”
