In my Openness book I argue that environmentalists often exaggerate the harm from global warming because they fail to consider the extent of human adaptability. Recent evidence (see below) suggests that even our extinct ancestor, Homo erectus, was already more adaptable to climate change than other advanced primates such as chimpanzees and orangutans.
(p. D3) Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home.
Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains had evolved. But a new study hints that maybe we aren’t so special.
A million years ago, researchers have found, an extinct species of human relatives known as Homo erectus thrived in a harsh desert landscape once considered off limits before Homo sapiens came along.
“It’s a significant shift in the narrative of adaptability, expanding it beyond Homo sapiens to include their earlier relatives,” said Julio Mercader, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary and an author of the study, which was published Thursday [Jan. 2?, 2025] in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
. . .
For hundreds of thousands of years, the researchers determined, Engaji Nanyori had been a comfortable open woodland. But around a million years ago, the climate dried up and the trees vanished. The landscape turned to a Mojave-like desert shrub land — an extremely arid place that seemed inhospitable for early hominins.
“The data led us to a pivotal question: How did Homo erectus manage to survive and even thrive under such challenging conditions?” Dr. Mercader said.
Instead of fleeing, the hominins figured out how survive in their changing home. “Their greatest asset was their adaptability,” Dr. Mercader said.
They changed the way they searched for animal carcasses to scavenge, for example. The hominins found the ponds and streams that sprang into existence after storms. They didn’t just drink at these fleeting watering holes. They hunted the animals that also showed up there, butchering their carcasses by the thousands.
The hominins also adapted by upgrading their tools. They took more care when chipping flakes from stones to give them a sharper edge. Rather than just pick up rocks wherever they were, they preferred material from particular places. And once they made a tool, they carried it with them.
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 20, 2025, and has the title “Extinct Human Species Lived in a Brutal Desert, Study Finds.”)
The academic paper in Communications Earth and Environment, mentioned above, is:
My book, mentioned in my initial comments, is:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.