Debate Heats Up On Role Of Climate In Human Evolution

Contact: Ann Cairns
acairns@geosociety.org
303-357-1056
Geological Society of America

Boulder, Colo.- Scientists at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Seattle next week are taking a comprehensive new look at drivers of human evolution. It now appears that climate variability during the Plio-Pleistocene (approximately 6 million years in duration) played a hugely important role. Astronomically controlled climate forcing on scales ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 years down to El Niños (5-7 years) made a highly unpredictable environment in which generalists with intelligence, language, and creativity were best able to adapt. Traditional studies of human evolution have focused largely on finding and dating hominid fossils. Today the investigation is rapidly expanding with advances in DNA research and understanding of global climate change. The combination of archeological, geologic, and paleoclimatic evidence allows scientists to explore such tantalizing questions as:

What were the drivers that may have nudged hominids toward bi-pedalism? Why did only one species ultimately succeed at it? How might global climate change have influenced brain development, development of tools, and the exodus from Africa? How did glacial periods in Europe, Asia, and North America impact humans? "The answers to these questions will not all come from the bones, but from what was taking place in the environment in which they were found," says Gail Ashley, Dept. of Geological Sciences, Rutgers University.

Ashley and Craig Feibel of Rutgers have assembled an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scientists – physical anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists, and paleoclimatologists – for a Pardee Keynote Symposia, The Paleoenvironmental and Paleoclimatic Framework of Human Evolution. The symposium takes place at GSA on Monday, Nov. 3.

William Ruddiman, celebrated author of Earth's Climate: Past and Future, provides an overview of climate change over the last several million years, helping to separate fact from fiction.

Bernard Wood, a world-renowned physical anthropologist, discusses the hominin family "Tree of Life" and the challenges of working with the meager fossil record of human evolution spanning the last 7 million years.

Thure Cerling is a pioneer in using isotope records of bones and teeth. With co-authors Meave Leakey and John Harris he provides a comprehensive look at the impact of climate change on the biological record from one of richest fossil sites in the world (Lake Tukana, Kenya).

Jonathan Wynn unravels some of the paleoclimate puzzles from fossil soils at key sites in the "Cradle of Mankind" in East Africa. The soils provide clear documentation of extremely arid events. Prolonged droughts may have been a factor in triggering migrations of hominins out of Africa.

Julia Lee-Thorpe, a trail blazing geochemist, has taken a more personal approach to human evolution by examining hominin nutrition through analyses of tooth enamel. Diet is a direct record of available food resources and an indirect record of the environment in which the individual lived.

Andrew Hill, a globally recognized expert on the paleontological record in East Africa, reports on the latest findings from the superb paleoenvironmental record of the Tugen Hills, Kenya (site of the discovery of the 6 million-year-old "Millennium Man").

Gail Ashley speculates on the critical role of the availability of water in affecting human evolution, based on studies from Olduvai Gorge and other fossil localities. Dramatic fluctuations in climate (wet to dry) in East Africa may have been an important factor in affecting natural selection of species able to cope through arid periods.

David Lordkipanidze and Reid Ferring tell an exciting chapter on the "Out-of-Africa" story from Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia. The 1.8 million-year-old hominin remains are the first discoveries outside Africa to show clear affinities to early African Homo.

Rick Potts, author of the provocative book Humanity's Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability, contributes important new findings from China revealing the successful adaption of some hominin groups 400,000 years ago to climatic fluctuations and drastic environmental change.

James Dixon, a recognized authority on peopling of the Americas, provides the most recent chapter in the record of humans. Continental ice sheets, sea level changes and the presence of the Bering land bridge effectively controlled immigration from Asia to the New World.

Craig Feibel provides perspective on the physical environmental constraints in which human evolution took place. He examines the role of geologic factors such as plate tectonics, sea level change, and climate fluctuations in affecting selective pressure on hominins and thereby impacting how and where humans evolved. The Paleoenvironmental and Paleoclimatic Framework of Human Evolution Monday, Nov. 3, 8:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., WSCTC Ballroom 6B

During the GSA Annual Meeting, Nov. 2-5, contact Ann Cairns at the GSA Newsroom, Washington State Convention Center and Trade Center, Seattle, for assistance and to arrange for interviews: 206-219-4615.

Geological Society of America 115th Annual Meeting Nov. 2-5, 2003 Washington State Convention and Trade Center Seattle, WA, USA

We Are All Panamanians

By Kathy A. Svitil
DISCOVER Vol. 17 No. 04 | April 1996 | Ancient Life

When the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea, it may have changed the climate of Africa--and encouraged the evolution of humans.

The emergence of the Isthmus of Panama has been credited with many milestones in Earth’s history. When it rose from the sea some 3 million years ago, the isthmus provided a bridge for the migration of animals between North and South America, forever changing the fauna of both continents. It also blocked a current that once flowed west from Africa to Asia, diverting it northward to strengthen the Gulf Stream. Now Steven Stanley, a paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins, says that that change in currents may be behind yet another major event: the evolution of humans. When the isthmus rearranged the ocean, he says, it triggered a series of ice ages that in turn had a crucial impact on the evolution of hominids in Africa.

Stanley’s hypothesis, which he describes in a new book called Children of the Ice Age, is based on ideas developed by a number of oceanographers over the past decade, notably Wallace Broecker of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Broecker has called attention to the climatological implications of a fundamental difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific: the Atlantic is much saltier. The difference arises in part because of the dry trade winds that blow west off the Sahara Desert, evaporating water off the ocean and leaving salt behind. The trade winds are thirsty, and they pick up a lot of moisture from the Atlantic, says Stanley. Much of that moisture is carried over into the Pacific and drops into the ocean. So the salinity is quite low on the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Panama, but very high on the Atlantic side.

The result is a global system of ocean currents called the conveyor belt. As salty water moves north in the Atlantic--carried by the Gulf Stream, for instance--it gets colder. The combination of extra saltiness and cold temperatures makes the water especially dense--and especially prone to sinking. In the vicinity of Iceland the salty water sinks to the ocean floor. From there it spreads southward to Antarctica, converges with another sinking current, and loops through the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific. There the water wells back up to the surface and slowly returns to the Atlantic around the tips of South America and Africa.

The entire conveyor belt, the theory goes, is driven by the sinking of water in the Atlantic, and ultimately by the salinity difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific. (The water of the North Pacific gets just as cold as the Atlantic in winter, Stanley says, but it doesn’t sink, because the Pacific is less salty, and therefore more buoyant.) And before the Isthmus of Panama formed, Stanley argues, the conveyor belt didn’t exist. Atlantic water flowed directly into the Pacific between the Americas, reducing the salinity difference. The water that then flowed into the North Atlantic, however, wasn’t salty enough to sink into the deep ocean; instead it continued northward to the Arctic. Therein lies the key, in Stanley’s view, to how the isthmus may have affected human evolution.

As long as North Atlantic waters flowed into the Arctic, he says, they kept it relatively warm--warm enough, for instance, that marine species from temperate climes, like the blue mussel, could use the Arctic to migrate from the Pacific to the Atlantic. After the isthmus formed, however, the conveyor belt denied the Arctic those warm waters, and because the sun strikes at such a low angle up there, Stanley says, it got very cold. Pack ice soon formed, which reflected the sun’s rays, chilling the region still further. Soon the influence of the frigid north spread inexorably south, as did the glaciers, and the Ice Age began--a long period of waxing and waning ice sheets from which we have yet to emerge.

The impact of the Ice Age was most strongly felt in the higher latitudes, but it also made Africa colder, windier, and drier. Many researchers have suspected that these changes spurred the evolution of Australopithecus, the earliest hominid. As Africa cooled and dried, this school of thought contends, the habitat of Australopithecus changed. Before the Ice Age began, there was probably a very broad zone of open forests on the fringe of the rain forest that was accessible to Australopithecus, Stanley says. When the world cooled off, however, the rain forest shrank, while desert and grassland regions expanded. That’s a big problem if you’re an australopithecine living a semiarboreal life in a forest habitat. It must have been a tremendous crisis, Stanley says. Australopithecus had to survive on the ground and evolve mechanisms that would allow it to do so. Sometime after 3 million years ago, it branched into two lineages--strong-jawed Paranthropus and big-brained Homo.

As it happens, there is now strong evidence linking that evolutionary split to a climate change in Africa. The evidence was reported last year by paleoclimatologist Peter deMenocal of Lamont-Doherty, who studied marine sediment cores drilled off the African coast. The cores contain dust blown off the neighboring continent, so they provide a record of how dry it was there when each layer of sediment was laid down--a colder, drier climate made for more dust. Over the past few million years, the African climate has oscillated continually between periods that were relatively cold and dry and ones that were warmer and wetter. But around 2.8 million years ago, the sediment cores show a pronounced change. The duration of the cold-warm cycles increased, from an average of around 23,000 years to 41,000 years. And judging from the increased amount of dust in the sediment, the cold periods got markedly colder and drier.

What’s more, says deMenocal, the sediment cores show the same chilling effect two more times in African history--and each time coinciding with a milestone in human evolution. The next change happened 1.7 million years ago--just about when Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of humans, appeared. The colds got colder, the winds got windier, and the dries got drier, says deMenocal. And then 1 million years ago the duration of these events became longer again--100,000 years instead of 41,000 years--while the colds got colder still, and the dries even drier. At around that time Paranthropus, presumably unable to survive a more hostile environment, died out, leaving the field to Homo erectus.

The lengths of the individual cold-warm cycles in Africa reflect the influence on Earth’s climate of another factor besides the oceanic conveyor belt--the periodic changes in the orientations of Earth’s axis that are known as Milankovitch cycles. The axis wobbles like a top’s, tracing out a circle against the stars every 23,000 years; meanwhile the angle at which it is tilted from the vertical oscillates every 41,000 years, from 21.5 degrees to 24.5 degrees and back. (Right now it is 23.5 degrees.)

DeMenocal’s sediment cores suggest that 2.8 million years ago, the tilt cycle took over dominance of the African climate from the wobble cycle--and made the climate more extreme. When the tilt angle is low, less sunlight hits the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in summer, less ice melts, and ice sheets expand. That is just what Stanley says happened when the Isthmus of Panama formed and ocean currents stopped warming the Arctic.

The rise of the isthmus, says Stanley, may have made Earth more susceptible to the tilt cycle and may have conspired with it to allow ice sheets to spread over the Northern Hemisphere. The effects of those ice sheets were soon felt in Africa. It’s a jolting notion of how the human genus evolved, Stanley says. The uplift of this skinny little neck of land between the Americas set in motion an enormous oceanographic change that allowed the Arctic to cool; that had an enormous effect in Africa, by drying the climate and leading to the evolution of Homo. In other words, we would not exist if this little neck of land had not risen up across the ocean from where our ancestors lived.

Sorry I didn't get home until late and I just collapsed. Hope I remembered what I tried to say earlier.

I have heard both sides of it. One thing is for certain is that the superior or more advanced cultures will ultamately absorb the weakers or less advanced.

I'm thinking of primitive societies like those that still exist in New Guinea and along the Amazon to name a few. Western civilization hasn't made many inroads there because of the geographic area and the difficulties those areas present. Personally, I'm glad. We have a lot to learn from those people even if it's just observing how we lived ages ago. There are plant species in the Amazon we haven't even heard of. These are medicinal plants which just might hold cures for illnesses- - -if we don't destroy them.

I just don't see how an area as large as Egypt could exist in the Bronze Age when right next door they are launching manned space missions out of the solar system on a daily basis. Sounds nice, but it would never happen.

No, they couldn't exit in the midst of modern technology unless they were isolated deep in the heart of the Amazon. They were the victims ultimately of the Persians, Greeks and Rome. Egyptian civilization tried to be static throughout these occupations, but its religion and funerary practices degenerated to a mere shadow of what it once was.

As far as slavery in old world, and interesting thing I ran into was the an article about the old oar propelled gallies (SP?) It seems that only the Romans used slaves for these and all the other ones, the guy who was the (engine) was the highest paid ones of the crew. That position was just considered too important.

That's right. Rome valued men of valor and strength. Gladiators who performed well in the arenas were often granted their freedom. Slaves did have the possibilities of purchasing their freedom, too. One of the problems with slavery on a large scale would be maintenance and control. Building projects like those during the Old Kingdom pyramid construction required 20-year periods and thousands of men. It would have been impossible to supervise and feed and shelter unwilling participants to perform without any incentives. During times when the Nile receded, it was necessary to harvest wheat. Manpower was mobilized toward that aim because wheat was their legal tender. Most Egyptologists discount the story of the Exodus simply because Egypt couldn't contain an army of slaves and because there is no evidence that they were forced out of Egypt.

I would love to be able to live and have the freedom of primitive man, providing I had a flush toilet, soft toilet paper, and access to modern medicine. I lived on a sailboat for six years and sailed half the way around the world on her. We lived under very primitive conditions and had nothing really modern on the boat. We lived very simular to Richard Danna's life of the 1830's in his book, "Two Years Before the Mast". These were the best years of my life. During this time when we sailed from the Cannaries to the British Virgin Islands, we were out of radio contact for three weeks. This meant we could hear no news on what was going on anywhere. The worst part of the trip was when I spotted a bouy leading into the Wilmington River below Savannah, Georgia. At this point, I knew the trip was over, and I had to get back to the real world.

That excursion does sound exciting. Sometimes I wish I could leave the real world for a while. My dream is to see the Galapagos Islands. It doesn't seem feasible that tourism will survive there for long. Flora and fauna are just too delicate to sustain man's interference. But generally speaking, roughing it for me is watching black and white TV. I wouldn't want to trade my creature comforts for the freedom the primitives have.

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