ARCH 131 Lecture : 5_1 Miocene_Pleistocene Environments_Lecture Script.pdf

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Archaeology
• Course: ARCH 131
• Professor: Dennis Sandgathe

Document Summary

Researchers studying trends in human evolution have looked for parallels between patterns in hominid evolution and climatic changes. The thinking is that perhaps major trends or changes in our hominin ancestors (things like encephalization and bipedalism) were responses to environmental change. While direct relationships between climate and specific evolutionary developments may be over simplistic, there is little doubt that changes in climate and environment played important roles in human biological and cultural evolution. As we have seen in earlier lectures, the cenozoic era, 65 million years ago to present, is when most of the evolution of primates occurred. This period is marked by a relatively constant decrease in average global temperatures, an increased variability in temperature between the equator and the poles, and an increase in seasonality. This graph illustrates the trend in global temperatures over the course of the cenozoic.