The discovery of pottery from the ancient Lapita culture by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) has shed new light on how Papua New Guinea served as a launching pad for the colonisation of the Pacific – one of the greatest migrations in human history.
The new study makes clear the initial expansion of the Lapita people throughout Papua New Guinea was far greater than previously thought.
The study, published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal, is based on the discovery of a distinctive Lapita pottery sherd, a broken piece of pottery with sharp edges, on Brooker Island in 2017 that lead researcher Dr Ben Shaw said was “like finding a needle in a haystack”.
“Lapita cultural groups were the first people to reach the remote Pacific islands such as Vanuatu around 3,000 years ago. But in Papua New Guinea where people have lived for at least 50,000 years, the timing and extent of Lapita dispersals are poorly understood,” Dr Shaw said.
“For a long time, it was thought Lapita groups avoided most of Papua New Guinea because people were already living there.”
The study shows Lapita people introduced pottery to Papua New Guinea that had distinct markings, as well as new tool technologies and animals such as pigs.
“We found lots of Lapita pottery, a range of stone tools and evidence for shaping of obsidian [volcanic glass] into sharp blades,” Dr Shaw said.
“As we dug deeper, we reached an even earlier cultural layer before the introduction of pottery. What amazed us was the amount of mammal bone we recovered, some of which could be positively identified as pig and dog. These animals were introduced to New Guinea by Lapita and were associated with the use of turtle shell to make tools.”
Dr Shaw said the new discovery explains why the Lapita people colonised the Pacific islands 3,000 years ago and the role that Indigenous populations in New Guinea had in Lapita decisions to look for new islands to live on.
According to Dr Shaw, later Lapita dispersals through PNG and interaction with Indigenous populations profoundly influenced the region as a global centre of cultural and linguistic diversity.
“It is one of the greatest migrations in human history and finally we have evidence to help explain why the migration might have occurred and why it took place when it did,” he said.
“We had no indication this would be a site of significance, and a lot of the time we were flying blind with the areas we surveyed and when looking for archaeological sites, so it is very much like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
The research involved many ANU researchers and international collaborators who showed how migration pathways and island-hopping strategies culminated in rapid and purposeful Pacific-wide settlement.
“A lot of our good fortune was because of the cultural knowledge, and we built a strong relationship with the locals based on honesty and transparency about our research on their traditional lands. Without their express permission, this kind of work would simply not be possible. The Brooker community is listed as the senior author on the paper to acknowledge their fundamental role in this research,” Dr Shaw said.
The results of their research have been published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01735-w) check link, while a video on Dr Shaw’s YouTube page also documents the archaeological excavations on Brooker Island, plus fieldwork in other parts of Papua New Guinea.
A new analysis of archaeological sites in the Americas challenges relatively new theories that the earliest human inhabitants of North America arrived before the migration of people from Asia across the Bering Strait. Conducted by University of Wyoming Professor Todd Surovell and colleagues from UW and five other institutions, the analysis suggests that misinterpretation of archaeological evidence at certain sites in North and South America might be responsible for theories that humans arrived long before 13,000-14,200 years ago.
The researchers' findings appear today in PLOS One, a journal published by the Public Library of Science. The paper is the latest development in the debate over the peopling of the Americas, in which some are now questioning the long-held consensus that the first Americans were hunter-gatherers who entered North America from Asia via the Beringia land bridge up to 14,200 years ago, and then dispersed southward between two large glaciers that then covered much of the continent.
The conclusions of Surovell and colleagues are based on an analysis of buried archaeological deposits, using a new statistic called the Apparent Stratigraphic Integrity Index they developed. While the stratigraphic integrity of early archaeological sites in Alaska is high -- producing strong evidence in support of unambiguous human occupation -- the sites in more southern locations pointing to possible earlier human occupation show signs of artifact mixing among multiple time periods.
"If humans managed to breach the continental ice sheets significantly before 13,000 years ago, there should be clear evidence for it in the form of at least some stratigraphically discrete archeological components with a relatively high artifact count. So far, no such evidence exists," Surovell and colleagues wrote. "(Our) findings support the hypothesis that the first human arrival to the New World occurred by at least 14,200 years ago in Beringia and by approximately 13,000 years ago in the temperate latitudes of North America. Strong evidence for human presence before those dates has yet to be identified in the archaeological record."
Specifically, the new analysis compared the stratigraphic integrity of three sites argued to contain evidence of earlier human occupation -- two in Texas and one in Idaho -- with the integrity of sites in Alaska, Wyoming and Pennsylvania. The three sites claimed to be older than 13,000 years ago all showed patterns of significant mixing, while the others did not.
The researchers were unable to obtain detailed information about some other sites in North and South America purported to contain evidence of human occupation before 13,000 years ago.
"Sites claimed to be older than 13,000 years ago are few, and data supporting their status as sites have been poorly disseminated," Surovell and colleagues wrote. "Given the status of available data regarding these sites, we must question whether there are any sites in the Americas south of the ice sheets that exhibit an unambiguous and stratigraphically discrete cultural occupation with sufficient numbers of artifacts of clear human manufacture."
The paper doesn't completely rule out the possibility that humans colonized the Americas at an earlier date. "But if they did, they should have produced stratigraphically discrete occupation surfaces, some of which would be expected to have large numbers of artifacts.
"That they did so in Beringia but failed to do so south of the continental glaciers suggests that either there was something fundamentally different about pre-Clovis human behavior and/or geomorphology south of the ice sheets, or that the evidence indicating the presence of humans south of the ice sheets has been misinterpreted," the researchers wrote. "At a minimum, it shows that, when stratigraphically discrete occupations are not present, additional studies must be performed to demonstrate that stratigraphic integrity of association between artifacts and dated strata exist."
Joining Surovell in the research were UW colleagues Sarah Allaun, Robert Kelly, Marcel Kornfeld and Mary Lou Larson; Wyoming State Archaeologist Spencer Pelton; Barbara Crass and Charles Holmes, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks; Joseph Gingerich, of Ohio University and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History; Kelly Graf, of Texas A&M University; and Kathryn Krasinski and Brian Wygal, both of Adelphi University.
Todd A. Surovell, Sarah A. Allaun, Barbara A. Crass, Joseph A. M. Gingerich, Kelly E. Graf, Charles E. Holmes, Robert L. Kelly, Marcel Kornfeld, Kathryn E. Krasinski, Mary Lou Larson, Spencer R. Pelton, Brian T. Wygal. Late date of human arrival to North America: Continental scale differences in stratigraphic integrity of pre-13,000 BP archaeological sites. PLOS ONE, 2022; 17 (4): e0264092 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264092
IMAGE: FOOD LIST COMPILED DURING THE REIGN OF KING INE OF WESSEX (C. 688-726), PART OF THE TEXTUS ROFFENSISview more
CREDIT: CHAPTER OF ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL
Very few people in England ate large amounts of meat before the Vikings settled, and there is no evidence that elites ate more meat than other people, a major new bioarchaeological study suggests. Its sister study also argues that peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers. The findings overturn major assumptions about early medieval English history.
‘You are what you eat’ isotopic analysis of over 2,000 skeletons by far the largest of its kind.
Early medieval diets were far more similar across social groups than previously thought.
Peasants didn’t give kings food as exploitative tax, they hosted feasts suggesting they were granted more respect than previously assumed.
Surviving food lists are supplies for special feasts not blueprints for everyday elite diets.
Some feasts served up an estimated 1kg of meat and 4,000 Calories in total, per person.
Picture medieval England and royal feasts involving copious amounts of meat immediately spring to mind. Historians have long assumed that royals and nobles ate far more meat than the rest of the population and that free peasants were forced to hand over food to sustain their rulers throughout the year in an exploitative system known as feorm or food-rent.
But a pair of Cambridge co-authored studies published today in the journal Anglo-Saxon England present a very different picture, one which could transform our understanding of early medieval kingship and society.
While completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett gave a presentation which intrigued historian Tom Lambert (Sidney Sussex College). Now at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Leggett had analysed chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th – 11th centuries. She then cross-referenced these isotopic findings with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation. Leggett’s research revealed no correlation between social status and high protein diets.
That surprised Tom Lambert because so many medieval texts and historical studies suggest that Anglo-Saxon elites did eat large quantities of meat. The pair started to work together to find out what was really going on.
They began by deciphering a food list compiled during the reign of King Ine of Wessex (c. 688-726) to estimate how much food it records and what its calorie content might have been. They estimated that the supplies amounted to 1.24 million kcal, over half of which came from animal protein. The list included 300 bread rolls so the researchers worked on the basis that one bun was served to each diner to calculate overall portions. Each guest would have received 4,140 kcal from 500g of mutton; 500g of beef; another 500g of salmon, eel and poultry; plus cheese, honey and ale.
The researchers studied ten other comparable food lists from southern England and discovered a remarkably similar pattern: a modest amount of bread, a huge amount of meat, a decent but not excessive quantity of ale, and no mention of vegetables (although some probably were served).
Lambert says: “The scale and proportions of these food lists strongly suggests that they were provisions for occasional grand feasts, and not general food supplies sustaining royal households on a daily basis. These were not blueprints for everyday elite diets as historians have assumed.”
“I’ve been to plenty of barbecues where friends have cooked ludicrous amounts of meat so we shouldn’t be too surprised. The guests probably ate the best bits and then leftovers might have been stewed up for later.”
Leggett says: “I’ve found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis. If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we’re just not finding that.”
“The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we’ve been led to believe. We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in.”
The researchers believe that even royals would have eaten a cereal-based diet and that these occasional feasts would have been a treat for them too.
Peasants feeding kings
These feasts would have been lavish outdoor events at which whole oxen were roasted in huge pits, examples of which have been excavated in East Anglia.
Lambert says: “Historians generally assume that medieval feasts were exclusively for elites. But these food lists show that even if you allow for huge appetites, 300 or more people must have attended. That means that a lot of ordinary farmers must have been there, and this has big political implications.”
Kings in this period – including Rædwald, the early seventh-century East Anglian king perhaps buried at Sutton Hoo – are thought to have received renders of food, known in Old English as feorm or food-rent, from the free peasants of their kingdoms. It is often assumed that these were the primary source of food for royal households and that kings’ own lands played a minor supporting role at best. As kingdoms expanded, it has also been assumed that food-rent was redirected by royal grants to sustain a broader elite, making them even more influential over time.
But Lambert studied the use of the word feorm in different contexts, including aristocratic wills, and concludes that the term referred to a single feast and not this primitive form of tax. This is significant because food-rent required no personal involvement from a king or lord, and no show of respect to the peasants who were duty-bound to provide it. When kings and lords attended communal feasts in person, however, the dynamics would have been very different.
Lambert says: “We’re looking at kings travelling to massive barbecues hosted by free peasants, people who owned their own farms and sometimes slaves to work on them. You could compare it to a modern presidential campaign dinner in the US. This was a crucial form of political engagement.”
This rethinking could have far-reaching implications for medieval studies and English political history more generally. Food renders have informed theories about the beginnings of English kingship and land-based patronage politics, and are central to ongoing debates about what led to the subjection of England’s once-free peasantry.
Leggett and Lambert are now eagerly awaiting the publication of isotopic data from the Winchester Mortuary Chests which are thought to contain the remains of Egbert, Canute and other Anglo-Saxon royals. These results should provide unprecedented insights into the period’s most elite eating habits.
References
S. Leggett & T. Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a Lack of (Isotopic) Enrichment’; Anglo-Saxon England (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000072
S. Leggett & T Lambert, ‘Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm’, Anglo-Saxon England (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000084
Researchers examined skeletons from before the Romans to the early Victorians for parasitic worm eggs
Intestinal worms were a common problem for British people across a wide period of history
The magnitude of the parasite problem in the UK changed over time
Understanding how parasitic worm infections changed in the past can help public health measures in regions of the world still experiencing problems today.
New research led by researchers from the Departments of Biology and Archaeology, Oxford, and published today in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, reveals the scale of parasitic worm infections in Britain from the Prehistoric to the early Victorian periods.
This type of research provides a unique insight into the lives and habits of past populations – their general health, cooking practices, diet, and hygiene.
Understanding how parasitic worm infections changed in the past can help public health measures in regions of the world still experiencing problems today.
Humans are infected with roundworms and whipworms through contamination by faecal matter and catch some tapeworms by eating raw or undercooked meat or fish.
Infections with parasitic worms are a big problem in many parts of the world today, particularly in some tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. But in the past, they were much more widespread and were common throughout Europe.
The research team wanted to find out the size and scale of parasitic worm infections in the UK over the course of history. So they looked for worm eggs in the soil from the pelvises of skeletons.
They tested a lot of individual skeletons. 464 human burials were examined from 17 sites, dating from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution.
People In the Roman and the Late Medieval period fared the worst, with the highest rates of worm infection detected. The infection rates were similar to those seen in the most affected regions today.
Things changed in the Industrial period. Worm infection rates differed a lot between different sites – some sites had little evidence of infection, while in others there was a lot of infection.
The researchers think that local changes in sanitation and hygiene may have reduced infection in some areas before nationwide changes during the Victorian 'Sanitary Revolution'.
The co-first authors, Hannah Ryan and Patrik Flammer said: 'Defining the patterns of infection with intestinal worms can help us to understand the health, diet and habits of past populations. More than that, defining the factors that led to changes in infection levels (without modern drugs) can provide support for approaches to control these infections in modern populations.'
The team will next use their array of parasite-based approaches to investigate other infections in the past. This includes more large-scale analyses of human burials, as well as continuing their ancient DNA work.
Their ambition is to employ a multidisciplinary approach, working closely with archaeologists, historians, parasitologists, biologists and other interested groups to use parasites to help understand the past.
IMAGE: PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING AMBIENT LIGHT LEVELS AND THE POSITION OF REPLICA PLAQUETTES IN RELATION TO THE FIRE (DURING EXPERIMENT E).view more
CREDIT: NEEDHAM ET AL., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)
Our early ancestors probably created intricate artwork by firelight, an examination of 50 engraved stones unearthed in France has revealed.
The stones were incised with artistic designs around 15,000 years ago and have patterns of heat damage which suggests they were carved close to the flickering light of a fire, the new study has found.
The study, by researchers at the Universities of York and Durham, looked at the collection of engraved stones, known as plaquettes, which are now held in the British Museum. They are likely to have been made using stone tools by Magdalenian people, an early hunter-gatherer culture dating from between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago.
The researchers identified patterns of pink heat damage around the edges of some of the stones, providing evidence that they had been placed in close proximity to a fire.
Following their discovery, the researchers have experimented with replicating the stones themselves and used 3D models and virtual reality software to recreate the plaquettes as prehistoric artists would have seen them: under fireside light conditions and with the fresh white lines engravers would have made as they first cut into the rock thousands of years ago.
Lead author of the study, Dr Andy Needham from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and Co-Director of the York Experimental Archaeology Research Centre said: “It has previously been assumed that the heat damage visible on some plaquettes was likely to have been caused by accident, but experiments with replica plaquettes showed the damage was more consistent with being purposefully positioned close to a fire.
“In the modern day, we might think of art as being created on a blank canvas in daylight or with a fixed light source; but we now know that people 15,000 years ago were creating art around a fire at night, with flickering shapes and shadows.”
Working under these conditions would have had a dramatic effect on the way prehistoric people experienced the creation of art, the researchers say. It may have activated an evolutionary capacity designed to protect us from predators called “Pareidolia”, where perception imposes a meaningful interpretation such as the form of an animal, a face or a pattern where there is none.
Dr Needham added: “Creating art by firelight would have been a very visceral experience, activating different parts of the human brain. We know that flickering shadows and light enhance our evolutionary capacity to see forms and faces in inanimate objects and this might help explain why it's common to see plaquette designs that have used or integrated natural features in the rock to draw animals or artistic forms.”
The Magdalenian era saw a flourishing of early art, from cave art and the decoration of tools and weapons to the engraving of stones and bones.
Co-author of the study, PhD student Izzy Wisher from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham, said: “During the Magdalenian period conditions were very cold and the landscape was more exposed. While people were well-adapted to the cold, wearing warm clothing made from animal hides and fur, fire was still really important for keeping warm. Our findings reinforce the theory that the warm glow of the fire would have made it the hub of the community for social gatherings, telling stories and making art.
“At a time when huge amounts of time and effort would have gone into finding food, water and shelter, it’s fascinating to think that people still found the time and capacity to create art. It shows how these activities have formed part of what makes us human for thousands of years and demonstrates the cognitive complexity of prehistoric people.”
Art by firelight? Using experimental and digital techniques to explore Magdalenian engraved plaquette use at Montastruc (France) is published in the journal PLOS ONE and will be available here.
Residing in the hills of southern Thailand, the Maniq comprise one of the last hunter-gatherer communities in the world. Although the Maniq are geographically isolated, they share many cultural features with the Semang peoples, most of whom live over the border in Malaysia. Due to the complex relationships among the various communities in mainland Southeast Asia, anthropologists have long debated the demographic history of the area, with one, two, three, or four waves of human migration having been proposed for the region. A recent study inGenome Biology and Evolutionby Tobias Göllner, Maximilian Larena, and colleagues titled “Unveiling the genetic history of the Maniq, a primary hunter-gatherer society” provides new insight into the Maniq and their relationships with other indigenous groups in mainland Southeast Asia.
The international team of researchers from the University of Vienna in Austria, Uppsala University in Sweden, and Khon Kaen University in Thailand studied 2.3 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 11 Maniq individuals who agreed to participate in the study. While a relatively small sample, this represents over 3% of the current Maniq population of ~250 individuals. The team then compared the data from the Maniq with both present-day populations and ancient DNA samples collected in the region.
“One of our main conclusions is that the Maniq are a very secluded community and have been separated from the other Semang for quite some time,” says Göllner, first author of the study. As suggested by their cultural ties, the Maniq appeared to be most closely related to the Semang groups in Malaysia, indicating a recent shared history. Comparisons with other modern groups showed that the Maniq and Malay Semang populations shared alleles with indigenous Papuans and Andamanese, indicating “deep historical relationships among these populations,” according to the study’s authors.
The study also revealed that the Maniq exhibited similarities to ancient DNA samples associated with the Hòabìnhian, a cultural complex of ancient hunter-gatherers thought to be the ancestors of present-day hunter-gatherers in mainland Southeast Asia. In the past, Hòabìnhian-related populations were more widespread, with descendants found in Laos, southern China, and even as far as Japan. According to the study’s authors, however, “due to the recent expansion of East Asian-related groups, the Hòabìnhian-related cultural communities were either displaced, replaced, or absorbed into the larger population of farmer migrants.” The study reveals that this was not the case with the Maniq, who remained largely isolated and retained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, “making them one of the few groups in mainland Asia carrying high levels of Hòabìnhian-related ancestry.”
The study did find evidence for some East Asian ancestry among the Maniq. “The most plausible model for the ancestral source of the Maniq is a combination of both Andamanese and East Asian-related ancestries,” posit the authors, with relative contributions of roughly 65% and 35%, respectively. The researchers estimated that this East Asian ancestry was introduced into the Maniq population approximately 700 years ago, likely via their Malay Semang neighbors.
The most striking finding of the study was the high degree of genetic differentiation exhibited by the Maniq, which was higher than what has been observed for the Mangyan Buhid of the Philippines and comparable to that of the Surui of Brazil, suggesting that the Maniq are more genetically differentiated than virtually any other known human population worldwide. This is likely due to a combination of genetic drift, a long history of geographic and cultural isolation, their historically small population size, and their cultural practice of marrying largely within their own society.
To validate these findings, Göllner hopes to conduct additional studies with larger sample sizes or full genome sequencing data. He notes that the current study and any future work “is only possible thanks to the participation of the Maniq and their long-standing relationship with our cultural anthropologist, Helmut Lukas.” Such studies are made more difficult however by the fact that the Maniq currently face several challenges, including intrusion from outsiders, ethnic discrimination, and most notably, the deforestation of the rainforest, limiting their ability to hunt, gather, and follow a traditional lifestyle. Says Göllner, “While solutions will have to be led by the Maniq and other citizens of Thailand, we hope that highlighting the importance of the Maniq will inspire change and help to protect their way of life.”
IMAGE: PREFERRED HABITATS OF HOMO SAPIENS (PURPLE SHADING, LEFT), HOMO HEIDELBERGENSIS (RED SHADING, MIDDLE), HOMO NEANDERTHALENSIS (BLUE SHADING, RIGHT) CALCULATED FROM A NEW PALEOCLIMATE MODEL SIMULATION CONDUCTED AT THE IBS CENTER FOR CLIMATE PHYSICS AND A COMPILATION OF FOSSIL AND ARCHEOLOGICAL DATA. LIGHTER VALUES INDICATE HIGHER HABITAT SUITABILITY. THE DATES (1 KA = 1000 YEARS BEFORE PRESENT) REFER TO THE ESTIMATED AGES OF THE YOUNGEST AND OLDEST FOSSILS USED IN THE STUDY.view more
CREDIT: INSTITUTE FOR BASIC SCIENCE
A study published in Nature by an international team of scientists provides clear evidence for a link between astronomically-driven climate change and human evolution.
By combining the most extensive database of well-dated fossil remains and archeological artefacts with an unprecedented new supercomputer model simulating earth’s climate history of the past 2 million years, the team of experts in climate modeling, anthropology and ecology was able to determine under which environmental conditions archaic humans likely lived (Fig. 1).
The impact of climate change on human evolution has long been suspected, but has been difficult to demonstrate due to the paucity of climate records near human fossil-bearing sites. To bypass this problem, the team instead investigated what the climate in their computer simulation was like at the times and places humans lived, according to the archeological record. This revealed the preferred environmental conditions of different groups of hominins[1]. From there, the team looked for all the places and times those conditions occurred in the model, creating time-evolving maps of potential hominin habitats.
“Even though different groups of archaic humans preferred different climatic environments, their habitats all responded to climate shifts caused by astronomical changes in earth’s axis wobble, tilt, and orbital eccentricity with timescales ranging from 21 to 400 thousand years,” said Axel Timmermann, lead author of the study and Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea.
To test the robustness of the link between climate and human habitats, the scientists repeated their analysis, but with ages of the fossils shuffled like a deck of cards. If the past evolution of climatic variables did not impact where and when humans lived, then both methods would result in the same habitats. However, the researchers found significant differences in the habitat patterns for the three most recent hominin groups (Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo heidelbergensis) when using the shuffled and the realistic fossil ages. “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”, said Prof. Timmermann.
“The next question we set out to address was whether the habitats of the different human species overlapped in space and time. Past contact zones provide crucial information on potential species successions and admixture,” said Prof. Pasquale Raia from the Università di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy, who together with his research team compiled the dataset of human fossils and archeological artefacts used in this study. From the contact zone analysis, the researchers then derived a hominin family tree, according to which Neanderthals and likely Denisovans derived from the Eurasian clade of Homo heidelbergensis around 500-400 thousand years ago, whereas Homo sapiens’ roots can be traced back to Southern African populations of late Homo heidelbergensis around 300 thousand years ago.
“Our climate-based reconstruction of hominin lineages is quite similar to recent estimates obtained from either genetic data or the analysis of morphological differences in human fossils, which increases our confidence in the results,” remarks Dr. Jiaoyang Ruan, co-author of the study and postdoctoral research fellow at the IBS Center for Climate Physics.
The new study was made possible by using one of South Korea’s fastest supercomputers named Aleph. Located at the headquarters of the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon, Aleph ran non-stop for over 6 months to complete the longest comprehensive climate model simulation to date. “The model generated 500 Terabytes of data, enough to fill up several hundred hard disks,” said Dr. Kyung-Sook Yun, a researcher at the IBS Center for Climate Physics who conducted the experiments. “It is the first continuous simulation with a state-of-the-art climate model that covers earth’s environmental history of the last 2 million years, representing climate responses to the waxing and waning of ice-sheets, changes in past greenhouse gas concentrations, as well as the marked transition in the frequency of glacial cycles around 1 million years ago,” adds Dr. Yun.
“So far, the paleoanthropological community has not utilized the full potential of such continuous paleoclimate model simulations. Our study clearly illustrates the value of well-validated climate models to address fundamental questions on our human origins,” says Prof. Christoph Zollikofer from the University of Zurich, Switzerland and co-author of the study.
Going beyond the question of early human habitats, and times and places of human species’ origins, the research team further addressed how humans may have adapted to varying food resources over the past 2 million years. “When we looked at the data for the five major hominin groups, we discovered an interesting pattern. Early African hominins around 2-1 million years ago preferred stable climatic conditions. This constrained them to relatively narrow habitable corridors. Following a major climatic transition about 800 thousand year ago, a group known under the umbrella term Homo heidelbergensis adapted to a much wider range of available food resources, which enabled them to become global wanderers, reaching remote regions in Europe and eastern Asia,” said Elke Zeller, PhD student at Pusan National University and co-author of the study.
“Our study documents that climate played a fundamental role in the evolution of our genus Homo. We are who we are because we have managed to adapt over millennia to slow shifts in the past climate,” says Prof. Axel Timmermann.
[1]This study considers the following hominin species: Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis (including African and Eurasian populations), Homo erectus and early African Homo (including Homo ergaster and Homo habilis).
