Linking Human Evolution and Climate Change

(From Science Daily) It’s not a take on climate change we often hear about. But Mark Collard, a Simon Fraser University Canada Research Chair and professor of archaeology, will talk about how climate change impacts human evolution at the world’s largest science fair.

The 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference runs Feb. 16 to 20 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in downtown Vancouver.

Collard will give a talk called Environmental drivers of technological evolution in small-scale populations during a seminar called Climate Change and Human Evolution: Problems and Prospects.

Collard will argue, “we need to better understand the ways that climate and related environmental variables have affected historically-documented small-scale societies before we can accurately track the impact of climate change on human evolution.”

The director of SFU’s Human Evolutionary Studies program, Collard will also present data that his research team is analyzing. Their research suggests environmental variation significantly influenced the number and intricacy of food-gathering tools that historical hunter-gatherers made.

Read more here: Linking Human Evolution and Climate Change