Climate change may be on everyone’s lips since the recent UN report, but don’t let that fool you. The shifts in climate we’re beginning to see are nothing new, as far as Earth — or our ancestors — are concerned.
But while all the talk nowadays focuses on how to change the course of the climate’s evolution, a study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests shifts in ancient weather patterns may have affected our own species’ evolution.
Researchers had long theorized that climate change might have impacted hominin evolution, but the data was sparse. No good repository of data combined accurate weather data over time with fossil evidence and other archaeological data.
So, the team of geoscientists behind today’s paper went out and got that data. They took core samples from Lake Magadi in southwest Kenya, sampling layers so deep they go back over ...
