The Earth System Context for Hominin Evolution

Consensus

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The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism; the emergence of our genus Homo; the first use of stone tools; increases in brain size; and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The Earth's geological record suggests that some evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate, raising the possibility that critical junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been affected by the environmental characteristics of the areas where hominins evolved. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution explores the opportunities of using scientific research to improve our understanding of how climate may have helped shape our species.

Improved climate records for specific regions will be required before it is possible to evaluate how critical resources for hominins, especially water and vegetation, would have been distributed on the landscape during key intervals of hominin history. Existing records contain substantial temporal gaps. The book's initiatives are presented in two major research themes: first, determining the impacts of climate change and climate variability on human evolution and dispersal; and second, integrating climate modeling, environmental records, and biotic responses.

Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution suggests a new scientific program for international climate and human evolution studies that involve an exploration initiative to locate new fossil sites and to broaden the geographic and temporal sampling of the fossil and archeological record; a comprehensive and integrative scientific drilling program in lakes, lake bed outcrops, and ocean basins surrounding the regions where hominins evolved and a major investment in climate modeling experiments for key time intervals and regions that are critical to understanding human evolution.

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128 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-14838-3
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-14839-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12825

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National Research Council. 2010. Understanding Climate's Influence on Human Evolution. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Robert M. Hamilton

ROBERT M. HAMILTON retired as Deputy Executive Director of DELS in 2004. He had previously served as Executive Director of CGER, following 30 years as a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He currently represents the NAS on a committee dealing with natural disaster loss reduction for the Inter-Academy Panel. Previously, he chaired the Committee on Disaster Reduction for the International Council for Science (ICSU), chaired the Scientific and Technical Committee of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), a United Nations program for the 1990s. He also served for two years with the IDNDR Secretariat in Geneva, including a year as director. He has been a member of the Inter-agency Task Force for the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, a follow-on United Nations program to the IDNDR. He also chaired the Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction of the National Science and Technology Council. Dr. Hamilton served as president of the Seismological Society of America, and president and secretary of the Seismology Section of the American Geophysical Union. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr Hamilton has a geophysical engineering degree from Colorado School of Mines, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Berhane Asfaw

BERHANE ASFAW is a palaeoanthropologist who manages the Rift Valley Research Service. He graduated from Addis Ababa University in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in geology, and later he earned his Ph.D. degree from University of California Berkeley's Anthropology graduate school. Dr. Asfaw has completed extensive survey work on the eastern and western side of the Awash River in Ethiopia. He was instrumental in explorations that discovered fossils thought to be some of the earliest hominids (called Ardithecus ramidus - dated at about 4 million-plus years). Those same expeditions also led to the discovery of Australopithecus garhi, a 2.5 million-year-old hominid found in association with old bones with cut marks. Dr. Asfaw has held positions within the Ethiopian government, including director of National Museums and coordinator of the Paleoanthropology Laboratory of The National Museum of Ethiopia.

Gail M. Ashley

GAIL M. ASHLEY is a professor of geological sciences and director of the Quaternary Studies Graduate Program at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Her research interests include a comparison of terrestrial records of paleoclimate during the Quaternary in polar, temperate, and tropical regions, and reconstruction of the paleoenvironment of early hominids. She is currently president of the American Geological Institute and has served as president of the Geological Society of America, vice-president of the International Association of Sedimentologists, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sedimentary Research, president of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, and a past member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. Dr. Ashley received B.S. and M.S. degrees in geology from the University of Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in geology from the University of British Columbia.

Thure E. Cerling

THURE E. CERLING (NAS) is Distinguished Professor of Geology and Geophysics and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah. His research focuses on near-surface processes and the geological record of ecological change, particularly using geochemical proxies to understand the physiology and paleodiets of mammals, using soils as indicators of climatological and ecological change over geologic time scales, and landscape evolution over the last several million years. Dr. Cerling has served on several NRC committees, including BESR, the U.S. Committee for Geodynamics, and the U.S. National Committee for the International Union for Quaternary Research. He is a member of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Dr. Cerling is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America. He received B.S degrees in geology and chemistry from Iowa State University, an M.S. degr ee in geology from Iowa State University, and his Ph.D. in geology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Andrew S. Cohen

ANDREW S. COHEN is a professor of geosciences and a joint professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. Dr. Cohen's research focuses on the paleolimnology, the interpretation of environmental and climatic history from lake deposits. He does most of his work on lakes in the African Rift VAlley, in the western US and in South America, with major projects investigating Quaternary climate change in Africa and the US Great Basin and studying deforestation impacts on lacustrine ecosystems. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California.

Peter B. deMenocal

PETER B. deMENOCAL is a professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He uses proxies in marine sediments, primarily stable isotope and trace metal geochemistry, to reconstruct past changes in ocean circulation and terrestrial climate. Recent research projects include: Holocene climate and ocean circulation variability, tropical to extratropical paleoclimate linkages, Pliocene-Pleistocene evolution of tropical climates, and human evolution and past african climates. Dr. deMenocal is widely recognized as one of the leaders of the scientific effort to understand earth parameters during the time that hominins evolved. He has a B.S. in geology from St. Lawrence University, an M.S. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of Oceanography, and a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University.

Andrew P. Hill

ANDREW P. HILL is the J. Clayton Stephenson Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, and Curator of Anthropology in the Peabody Museum. Other affiliations are with the Council on Archaeological Studies and the Council on African Studies. Before coming to Yale in 1985 he held research positions at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, and at Harvard. He is interested in the whole range of human evolution, particularly in the environmental and ecological context in which it occurred. Since 1968 he has carried out field work in eastern Africa, in Pakistan, and in the United Arab Emirates. For many years he has directed the Baringo Paleontological Research Project, a multidisciplinary research program operating in the Tugen Hills, Kenya. He teaches courses on different aspects of human evolution, faunal analysis, and taphonomy. Dr. Hill has a B.Sc. (Hons) from Reading University and a Ph.D. from the University of London.

Thomas C. Johnson

THOMAS C. JOHNSON is a professor of geology and was the founding director of the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota, Duluth from 1994 to 2004. His research interests currently focus on tropical paleoclimatology, based primarily on the analysis of sediment cores recovered from the large lakes of the East African Rift Valley. Dr. Johnson served as a member of the Great Lakes Research Managers Council, International Joint Commission from 2000 to 2004, and he was the co-founder and member of the Steering Committee of the International Decade for East African Lakes (IDEAL) from 1993 to 2005. He serves of the Boards of Directors of DOSECC (Deep Observation and Sampling of the Earth's Continental Crust) and of the International Association of Limnogeologists. He has a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California at San Diego.

John E. Kutzbach

JOHN E. KUTZBACH (NAS) is professor emeritus of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and environmental sciences in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to retirement, he was Director at the Center for Climatic Research. He continues a part-time appointment as Associate Director and Senior Scientist. His research focuses on understanding the processes that control climate variablity, and trends in the past, present and future, studying decade/century scale climate variability over recent millennia as well as linkages between vegetation changes and climate changes. Dr. Kutzbach is a fellow of the the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. Some of his awards include the “Revelle Medal” of the American Geophysical Union and the “Milankovitch Medal” of the European Geophysical Society. He has B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Richard Potts

RICHARD POTTS is a paleoanthropologist and director of the Human Origins Program and curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. His research focuses on the history of the interrelationships between human evolution and the ecosystem. Over the past decade, Dr. Potts has led excavations at early human sites in the East African rift valley, and currently directs a multidisciplinary research team at the handaxe site of Olorgesailie, Kenya. In addition to research articles and books, he has recently completed a book for a general audience titled Humanity's Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability. In addition, Dr. Potts was awarded a Certificate of Honor by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the Emmy-winning Tales of the Human Dawn on PBS. He has a B.A. in anthropology from Temple University and a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard University.

Alan R. Rogers

ALAN R. ROGERS is a professor of anthropology and adjunct professor of biology at the University of Utah. Dr. Rogers’ research focuses on using genetic data to understand the history of human population size, based on developing new statistical methods to detect population size changes using sequence data. This largely focuses on understanding the huge population increase of early humans in the Late Pleistocene. Additionally, his research interests include the adaptive evolution of such traits as menopause and human time preference. In 1991, the University of Utah recognized Dr. Rogers’ work with their Superior Research Award. He was a former Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution. He received a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from the University of New Mexico.

Alan Walker

ALAN C. WALKER (NAS) is the Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology and Biology at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Walker endeavors to extract ancient behaviors from the fossil and taphonomic record. Teeth record information about an individual's life history and semicircular canals are tuned to a species' rapidity of locomotion. Walker is now developing nondestructive methods for examining tooth enamel and measuring fossil labyrinths so that rare hominoid and hominid specimens can be used. He is a research associate of the National Museum of Kenya and has had many collaborative field programs with the Museum, the latest being at Allia Bay, east Lake Turkana. He has a B.A. (hons) in geology from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in anatomy and paleontology from the University of London. He also has an honorary D.Sc. from the University of Chicago. Dr. Walker is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

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The Earth System Context for Hominin Evolution

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The Earth System Context for Hominin Evolution

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Understanding Climate's Influence on Human Evolution

Description

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Provide feedback

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More like this

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

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