Supercomputer simulations show climate change’s role in early human migration
Humanity's expansion across the globe is inextricably tied to the environmental conditions that our early ancestors faced. On Wednesday, a research team from South Korea's Pusan National Universityfrom supercomputing modeling that suggests just how much of humanity's rise is thanks to changes in prehistoric weather.
The Pusan team, led by climate physicist Axel Timmermann, used an"unprecedented transient Pleistocene-coupled general circulation model simulation in combination with an extensive compilation of fossil and archaeological records to study the spatiotemporal habitat suitability for five hominin species over the past 2 million years," per the study published inThat 2-million year model, which the team refers to as the 2ma simulation,"reproduces key palaeoclimate records such as...
Basically, the team was looking at how the 41,000-year cyclical patterns of precipitation and temperature change caused by the impacted the availability of resources for early humans and our close cousins. By combining the synthetic data generated by the 2ma simulation with the hard evidence of fossil and archaeological findings, the team puzzled out the places whereThe Pusan team noted a few surprising trends emerging from the data. For example, the researchers found that around 700,000 years ago,began expanding from their traditional range.
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