The Role of Climate Change in Early Human Behavioural Evolution

气候变化在早期人类行为进化中的作用

• 批准号: 2903287
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Liverpool
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2903287
• 关键词: Role; Climate; Change; Early; Human; Role; Climate; Change; Early; Human

It is widely recognised that all long-term species evolution is influenced by climatic and environmental conditions. These factors are relatively poorly understood for much of human evolutionary history, partly due to a lack of synthesis. Ecological Niche Modelling (ENM) offers archaeologists a method to generate global, continental and regional scale predictive models of human niche exploitation, providing the broad context for major evolutionary trends and synthesising disparate data from archaeological sites into a cohesive framework. This research will build models of early human occupation across Africa and Eurasia, focusing on a key period of human evolution and climate change within the Middle Pleistocene. The Middle Pleistocene encompasses defining changes in human behaviour and biology underpinning the later emergence of Homo sapiens including; technological innovations, repeated use of fire, extended childhood learning, increases in brain size and expansion in to higher latitudes. This follows a period of significant climatic upheaval, and through ENM this research will examine correlations between climate change, habitat change, and human responses, improving our understanding of the impact of Middle Pleistocene climate change on our evolution. Although ENMs have become established in the biological sciences, their application to archaeological data requires further exploration and refinement to better understand the inherent uncertainty in the models with implications for the scope of interpretations. This research will examine the challenges raised by chronological uncertainty, and explore how increasing model complexity may affect reliability in these extended time-spans.

人们普遍认为，所有长期物种进化都受气候和环境条件的影响。这些因素在人类进化史的大部分时间里相对较少，部分原因是缺乏综合。生态利基建模（ENM）为考古学家提供了一种生成人类利基剥削的全球，大陆和区域规模预测模型的方法，为主要进化趋势提供了广泛的背景，并将考古遗址的层实数据综合为凝聚力框架。这项研究将建立整个非洲和欧亚大陆早期人类职业的模型，重点是中期更新世内人类进化和气候变化的关键时期。更新世中期包括定义人类行为和生物学的变化，其后来的同性恋智者的出现包括：技术创新，反复使用火力，扩展儿童学习，大脑大小的增加并扩展到更高的纬度。这是一个重大气候动荡的时期，通过ENM，这项研究将研究气候变化，栖息地变化和人类反应之间的相关性，从而提高了我们对中更新世气候变化对进化的影响的理解。尽管ENM已在生物科学中建立，但它们在考古数据中的应用需要进一步的探索和完善，以更好地了解模型中固有的不确定性，对解释范围有影响。这项研究将研究按时间顺序不确定性提出的挑战，并探讨增加模型复杂性如何影响这些延长的时间跨度的可靠性。