Summer 2017, Cover Stories, Daily News
Animals, not drought, shaped our ancestors' environment
Mon, Jun 26, 2017
Animals, not drought, shaped our ancestors' environment
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH—The shores of Lake Turkana, in Kenya, are dry and inhospitable, with grasses as the dominant plant type. It hasn't always been that way. Over the last four million years, the Omo-Turkana basin has seen a range of climates and ecosystems, and has also seen significant steps in human evolution. Scientists previously thought that long-term drying of the climate contributed to the growth of grasslands in the area and the rise of large herbivores, which in turn may have shaped how humans developed. It's tough to prove that hypothesis, however, because of the difficulty of reconstructing four million years of climate data.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/summer-2017/article/animals-not-drought-shaped-our-ancestors-environment
