Climate Change and Human Evolution

Catalog description

Variability in the Earth’s climate over time has been a major driver of the evolution of all life over the past 3 billion years. Understanding the processes of long-term global climate change is therefore a critical part of understanding the evolution of human beings. In this course, we will survey a variety of topics related to the multidisciplinary study of climate change and human evolution. Students will be introduced to the fundamentals of climate science, including what drives global climatic change at a variety of timescales and how researchers are able to study past climates. Fundamentals of evolutionary theory will also be introduced and we will explore how the evolutionary dynamics of life can be related to climatic shifts. We will then move to a survey of early primate and hominin evolution within global and regional climatic contexts. Finally, we will discuss how recent humans have had an impact on global climates and on other forms of life on Earth.