This is why members of the same family tend to have similar characteristics. The human brain, in all its staggering complexity, is the product of millions of years of evolution. Genetic variation is a term used to describe the variation in the DNA sequence in each of our genomes. Genetic variation is what makes us all unique, whether in terms of hair colour, skin colour or even the shape of our faces. If you have any other comments or suggestions, please let us know at comment yourgenome.
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Because the fossil record is so patchy, fossils provide only minimum dates. Human DNA suggests even earlier origins for modernity. All living humans descend from those people, suggesting that we inherited the fundamental commonalities of our species, our humanity, from them. All human cultures form long-term pair bonds between men and women to care for children. We sing and dance. We make art.
We preen our hair, adorn our bodies with ornaments, tattoos and makeup. We craft shelters. We wield fire and complex tools. We form large, multigenerational social groups with dozens to thousands of people. We cooperate to wage war and help each other. We teach, tell stories, trade. We have morals, laws. The details of our tools, fashions, families, morals and mythologies vary from tribe to tribe and culture to culture, but all living humans show these behaviours.
That suggests these behaviours — or at least, the capacity for them — are innate. Scientific methods can help us comprehend how emissions from our vehicles and factories are causing Earth to warm, and how that warming will affect everything from sea levels to biodiversity. We can study how the use of certain fertilizers on land will destroy marine ecosystems thousands of miles away.
We are aware of the finiteness of Earth's natural resources and can use this knowledge to analyze the short- and long-term effects of their gradual depletion. Having this self-awareness along with our creative problem-solving will be critical to helping repair some of the negative effects of the Anthropocene, and will help us to be conscious of those effects into the future. Changing climate is not a unique feature of the Anthropocene.
The last six million years when hominins began to appear in the fossil record were particularly volatile and saw many different shifts in environments. The key to human survival in these settings was an extraordinary ability of our ancestors to alter their behavior and the world around them.
Our success in these times was largely due to the evolution over time of a number of traits that allowed us to be more adaptable to a large variety of environmental conditions. The first bipedal hominins were able to live both on the ground and in trees, which gave them an advantage as the habitat oscillated between forests and grasslands. The ability of early humans to make and use tools, including the control of fire, allowed them to more easily access food by scraping meat off of bones more efficiently, crushing bones for the marrow inside, and obtaining new plant foods such as nutritious tubers and roots from underground.
Tool use also enabled early hominins to diversify their diet, so they had plenty of options when certain plants and animals went extinct. And with a larger and more complex brain, early humans gained the capacity for everything from language to creative problem-solving.
Other species in our evolutionary tree had features that were more specialized to one particular environment, and they were very successful for long periods of time in those environments.
Yet these localized features restricted their ability to live in new conditions, limiting how effectively they could inhabit new geographic zones or could adjust to unusual climatic shifts. If they were unable to adapt to new conditions or change their location significantly, they died out. A good example of that are the Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis. Members of this species had bodies that were well suited for cold climates; their short, stocky bodies, large noses, and their ability to make clothing were all specialized features for successful living in the cold.
In contrast, Homo sapiens had an extremely enhanced ability to adapt their behavior to new surroundings, despite having physical features more suited for an African climate. It became particularly difficult for Neanderthals to compete with the innovative Homo sapiens , and with a geographic range limited by their specialization to cold, they eventually went extinct.
While Neanderthals and all other early human species exhibited some of the human characteristics of adaptability, Homo sapiens distinguish themselves with an extreme reliance on altering their landscapes and themselves for survival. The volatility of past climates does not diminish the effects of human activity in the Anthropocene. The types of changes that we have seen in the last two hundred years are far outside the range of variability we see in the past. Examining the Anthropocene through the lens of our evolutionary history shows us that the themes of resilience and adaptability are critical to the history of our species in the past and in the Anthropocene.
These distinctive traits of our lineage have created a human species that is defined by its ability to alter its behavior and environment as a mode of survival. These themes are critical to understanding how the Anthropocene has come to be, and how we will survive into the future.
We can never return the environment to how it was in the past. The conditions of the past have been so varied that there is no stable baseline on which to base what "the past" looked like. Stories of mass extinctions and the destruction of our major cities are useful tools to put the urgency of our situation in perspective. Using new technology the site was found to be older than first thought.
With computerised reconstructions of the partial skull found, the scientists for the study were able to establish that the inhabitants of Jebel Irhoud would have looked very similar to humans today.
Without a hat, however, the Jebel Irhoud skull looks lower and more elongated from the back. Log In. Contact us Sign up for newsletters.
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