Conculsions

Overall, the evidence shows that hominins were able to adapt to changing environments to different degrees. The genus Homo, to which our species belongs, had the capacity to adjust to a variety of environmental conditions, and Homo sapiens is especially able to cope with a broad range of climatic conditions, hot and cold environments, arid and moist ones, and with all kinds of varying vegetation. We use resources from a vast variety of plants and animals and use many specialized tools. We have many social contacts and means of exchanging resources and information to help us survive in a constantly changing world.

The idea that the major adaptations in our evolutionary history arose in response to environmental variability and shifting selection pressures (variability selection) leads to a new understanding of human evolution. The figure above illustrates how the emergence of human characteristics from 6 million years ago to present conferred benefits that improved the ability of our ancestors to survive unpredictable and novel environments. Ma = million years ago; ka = thousand year ago.

Humans today represent the one species that has survived from the diversity of hominin species. Despite their very close relationship with our species, and despite the fact that all of them possessed some combination of features that characterize humans today, these earlier species and their ways of life are now extinct. The question ahead is how well our sources of resilience as a species will succeed as our alterations of the landscape, atmosphere, and water interact with the tendency of Earth’s environment to shift all on its own. This is an ‘experiment’ just now unfolding, one that has never occurred before. The intensity of environmental change seems likely to create entirely new survival challenges for the lone hominin species on the planet, and many other organisms as well.

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