Impact of Climate Change on Hominins: Middle Pleistocene Through to the Holocene

In this talk, I will review current thinking regarding the impact of climate change on the last couple of hundred thousand years of human evolution—the time period during which our own species, Homo sapiens, originated. In addition to looking at how climate change may have affected this process, I will discuss the impact of climate change on the dispersal of modern humans across the globe, and on the evolution of modern human cultural behavior. I will show that there is plenty of suggestive evidence that climate has affected the evolution of our species but more work is needed to clarify the details. Interdisciplinary studies that integrate archaeological and palaeoclimate data would be particularly beneficial in this regard.