Understanding Climate's Influence on Human Evolution (2010) / Chapter Skim
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4 Implementing an International ScientificProgram for Climate and HumanEvolution Research
4 Implementing an International ScientificProgram for Climate and HumanEvolution Research
Pages 58-84
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From page 58... ...
or European scientists and their counterparts in the African or Asian country where the field research occurs, broader partnerships and funding efforts are still relatively rare. This is an obvious impediment to future advances at the earth system/human origins research frontier, where truly international efforts have great potential to make significant progress.
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From page 59... ...
We envision a new scientific program for international climate and human evolution studies that involves both essential and supporting components: Essential Components Three elements must be carefully integrated to comprise the core program of research: • A major exploration initiative to locate new fossil sites, and to broaden the geographic and temporal sampling of the fossil and archaeological record; • A comprehensive, integrated scientific drilling program in lakes, lake bed outcrops, and ocean basins surrounding the regions where hominins evolved, to vastly improve our understanding of the climate and environmental history of these regions; • A major investment in climate modeling experiments for the key time intervals and regions that are critical for understanding human evolution, focused on understanding the regional climate patterns and fundamental climate forcing mechanisms, and to model at a more local scale the interactions between climate, ecosystems, and species population dynamics. Supporting Components In addition, there are a number of components that will be required to complement the core research effort: • A systematic analysis of fossil sites and collections, with application of new imaging and dating technologies, to better describe the nature and timing of the hominin evolutionary lineage; • An investigation of how population sizes have changed over the past 500,000 years, based on whole-genome samples of DNA from a number of species, including humans; • Selected investigations of ecosystem dynamics through the collection of modern climate and calibration data to more accurately quantify relationships between the environment and the proxy records of environment preserved in sediments and fossils; • Development of the informatics and data archiving tools needed to both provide permanent storage for the wide array of information collected by the activities listed above and to facilitate continued access to and the synthesis of this information.
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From page 60... ...
INTERNATIONAL EXPLORATION INITIATIVE: ADDRESSING THE URGENT NEED FOR MORE FOSSILS An urgent need exists for a major international initiative to recover significantly more hominin fossils, as well as the flora and fauna that are associated with these fossils. Exploration for new sites is required beyond the limited areas within continents that have been sampled so far.
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From page 61... ...
. Enhancing discovery at the other end of the spectrum -- actually finding hominin fossils -- requires trained eyes to scan the surface of fossiliferous sediments for suitable fossils (Figure 4.1C)
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From page 62... ...
INTEGRATED MARINE, LAKE, AND TERRESTRIAL DRILLING PROGRAM An integrated marine-lake-terrestrial scientific drilling program is an essential component of a research initiative to obtain a comprehensive paleoenviron
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From page 63... ...
Africa's largest drainage basins -- the Nile, Niger, Zambezi, and Congo -- each drain several millions of square kilometers and thus constitutes large areal integrators of regional climate characteristics. Smaller drainage basins, such as the Ganane and Rufiji, drain areas that contain known hominin fossil localities.
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From page 64... ...
New highquality sediment drill cores from the Gulf of Aden remains a top drilling priority. A proposal to drill six new sites in the Gulf of Aden was recently ranked by an international science panel of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)
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From page 65... ...
. Another related study from this same area used δ13C analyses of plant wax biomarkers to document large glacial/interglacial changes in the relative proportion of C3-C4 vegetation in the Congo Basin (Schefuß et al., 2005)
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From page 66... ...
. The recently completed Lake Malawi Scientific Drilling Project (Box 4.1)
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From page 67... ...
The Gulf of Aden represents the single best opportunity to recover sediments that have recorded past changes in northeast African climate proximal to hominin fossil localities in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. An Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)
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From page 68... ...
Possible targets for Phase I drilling include a number of lakes located mostly in East Africa -- these would need to be prioritized after discussion by the scientific community. Lake records typically provide paleoenvironmental information for a limited region, but when coupled with records from the river distal fans offshore, these should provide insights into the environmental history of much of the African continent.
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From page 69... ...
Drilling Lakes Albert, Edward, and Kivu in the western Rift Valley would provide important contrasts to the records from the Congo distal fan, while records from Lakes Victoria, Challa, and Tanganyika should prove to be particularly relevant to the results from the Zambezi River distal fan. Lake Chad is likely to yield discontinuous records, but might be expected to provide higher resolution information during some time intervals.
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From page 70... ...
The primary targets for Phase II drilling would include Lakes Turkana, Edward, Albert, Tanganyika, and Malawi. Terrestrial Drilling In parallel with efforts to drill the modern "extant" lakes, an effort should be made to obtain drill cores from paleolake deposits exposed on-land, located in key sedimentary basins where fossil hominins have been recovered.
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From page 71... ...
. INTEGRATED HIGH-RESOLUTION EARTH SYSTEM MODELING AND DETAILED ENVIRONMENTAL RECORDS By combining analyses of observational data recording past environmental change with parallel earth system modeling studies at sufficiently high resolution, it will be possible to obtain a much more accurate and regionally based description of the evolution of paleoenvironments over the past 8 million years in Africa and Eurasia, as well as an improved understanding of the causes of the paleoenvironmental changes.
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From page 72... ...
. Some submodules have already been linked to climate models for studies of future and past climate (e.g., dynamic vegetation changes, fire ecology, ice sheet growth and decay, and hydrology of lakes and rivers)
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From page 73... ...
73 iMPlEMENtiNg AN iNtERNAtioNAl sCiENtiFiC PRogRAM BOX 4.2 Earth System Climate Models Earth system climate models represent the complex interacting set of com ponents that includes the oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and the Earth's surface. Model simulations show how the changing controls on climate from seasonal insolation, carbon dioxide concentrations, and ice sheet size may have affected regional and continental climate and environmental patterns.
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From page 74... ...
A pilot project has already been carried out at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi by the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, using a microCT scanner that was temporarily relocated to Nairobi in 2008, and which scanned hominids and a few other primates. There are several major benefits from scanning as many fossils as possible in this way: 1.
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From page 75... ...
6. In this way, vertebrate paleontologists, wherever they are on the globe, would have access to an ever-increasing sample of virtual specimens that were collected at remote field sites.
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From page 76... ...
. A difference of ~0.5 percent is important when comparing volcanic ash dates from homininbearing terrestrial sequences with marine records of sapropel formation -- a difference of 0.5 percent at 4 Ma equates to 20,000 years, and this corresponds to the periodicity of one of the major orbital cycles.
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From page 77... ...
Comparable descriptions of regional climate characteristics for Africa would greatly improve our understanding of the important climate changes associated with long-term monsoon and El Niño histories. Well-dated, detailed, continuous climatic records from speleothems over the past million years would provide an excellent context against which to compare continuous lake records; both of these will provide a basis for understanding the noncontinuous records where hominin fossils are found.
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From page 78... ...
Both projects will be immensely useful in the scientific program for international climate and human evolution research proposed here, but neither is sufficient. Both will study DNA from the same individuals in three large African populations, but there are no plans to include small populations such as the San (or !
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From page 79... ...
. The international scientific program for climate and human evolution research proposed here will need to establish data access protocols to ensure that research results -- whether digital scans of hominin fossils, the fossils themselves, or climate proxy parameters from deep ocean cores -- are provided to the broader scientific community in an open and timely manner.
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From page 80... ...
for Mio-Pliocene faunal specimens, NOW (Neogene Mammals of the Old World) , the Smithsonian's HOP (Human Origins Program Database)
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From page 81... ...
PUBLIC OUTREACH OPPORTUNITIES Research focused on the earth system context of human evolution unites two scientific fields that are among the most publicly visible -- climate change and human origins. The study of human evolution represents one of the most compelling subjects in the natural sciences in that it deals with the long-term origin of our species; and climate change has become a focal point in communicating the meaningfulness of science and its relationship to the welfare of humans, all living things, and entire ecosystems.
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From page 82... ...
This idea, initiated as part of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Initiative, is to offer a multiday institute for educators focused on human evolution and environmental change research and on strategies for improving the comprehension of science. The audience for this institute will include school-based educators, staff from informal science education institutions (e.g., museums, science centers)
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From page 83... ...
in order to learn what scientists do -- how they find out about past climate change, human evolution, and the potential impact of environment on human adaptation, and why science depends on the public's understanding of the ways research is conducted and the meaning of new findings. Such internships would promote cross-national efforts in science education, and would allow students and teachers to participate in regular webcasts from field sites around the world that could be followed online by millions of people in formal and informal educational settings.
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From page 84... ...
, TERC (Technical Education Research Centers) , EDC (Education Development Center, Inc.)
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