Hot climate fired-up human evolution

• Autores: Sam Wong
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3046, 2015, págs. 8-9
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Now some ancient herbivore teeth are revealing Turkana's special climate around the time genus Homo first appeared. Turkana has been a hallowed site for the study of human evolution ever since Maeve and Richard Leakey began uncovering fossils there in the 1960s. Ranging from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, the most striking finds include Turkana boy, a Homo erectus fossil that's the most complete early human skeleton ever found. By studying fossil teeth from across the region, Mikael Fortelius at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and his team have pieced together a record of the region's temperature and rainfall that goes back 8 million years. Their data show that East Africa as a whole became drier between 3 million and 2 million years ago--the period when genus Homo first emerged. But the Turkana basin began to dry out earlier.