Climate changes have been driving the evolution of the human genus since our ancestors first ventured to walk upright, through the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens , and the great migrations of Huns, Mongols, and Vikings that changed history. Climate is vitally linked to ecosystems, so any change forces living beings to adapt, move to a more favorable location, or become extinct. The human genus seems to have excelled at the first two options throughout its two million-year history. The ability of species to adapt to environmental transformations is known as natural selection, one of the main engines of evolution, first described in Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, it wasn't until 1925 that Raymond Dart proposed that climate had been a significant driver in human evolution. This marked the beginning of the Savannah Hypothesis, which suggests that our ancestors took a different evolutionary path from other primates to adapt to life on the Af
The Neanderthal is the most famous of our extinct human relatives. Few people don't know the name, but fewer still know what their daily lives were like in the midst of the Ice Age. Thanks to an incredible number of scientific discoveries in recent decades, we now have a much clearer picture. The day we learned that we had shared the planet with other humans, 167 years ago, a campaign began to differentiate them from us. The first known Neanderthal skeletal remains, which gave them their name, were discovered in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856. For nearly 150 years, Neanderthals were differentiated from Homo sapiens in every way possible. However, in the past 20 years, the amount of knowledge we have acquired about them, both through fossil and archaeological discoveries and through the sequencing of their DNA, has allowed experts to understand what their daily lives were really like. Neanderthals were skilled hunters and gatherers of a wide variety of foods. They controlled f