After reading several scholarly researches on human evolution, I came to believe the authors’ hypothesis: Environmental change caused human change.
After reading several scholarly researches on human evolution, I came to believe the authors’ hypothesis: Environmental change caused human change.
It is said that, man went through a lot of different stages to evolve into the human being of today, since the evolution of man (and the Stone Age) that covers a period of roughly 3 million years.
People commonly assume that our species have evolved very little since prehistoric times. Yet new studies using genetic information from populations around the globe suggest that the pace of human evolution increased with the advent of agriculture and cities.
If we are still evolving, what might our species look like in a millennium should we survive whatever environmental and social surprises are in store for us? Speculation ranges from the hopeful to the dystopian.
For the evolution of modern man to come to pass, it was argued, a mild environment was required.
Such an environment or niche, with its features of mild climate, abundant fresh water, plentiful food sources and generally, easy-to-obtain resources, enabled the evolution and establishment.
Early man’s cultural interaction with a mild environment permitted the necessary survival time for such long-term maturation, in contrast to what would have occurred under harsh conditions, and thereby precluded the extinction of such through premature death.
Once such faculties were established through a completed maturation, and thus available to and maintained by subsequent generations of progeny, the evolved Homo-Sapiens could readily create innovative cultural systems, involving innovative technologies, that would eventually enable modern man’s spread and effective accommodation to harsh, restrictive environmental conditions after having evolved in a mild environment.
In the original thesis, it was proposed, based on fossil evidence that modern man (or humans) first evolved in the Near East. At the time of this evolution, the Middle East had a very temperate climate, ample rainfall, lush vegetation and plentiful game, enabling the creation of cultural systems in such a situation highly protective of long-term maturating, high-level mental faculties.
By virtue of this protection or support, such mental faculties had ample time to be established or completely developed, to be adaptively effective, enabling the accelerated evolution and stabilization, through time, of modern man in the Middle East.
Current views of human evolution, based on additional fossil evidence and geological data, do not dispute this. In fact, evidence suggests that modern humans evolved from archaic Homo-sapiens independently in varied regions of mild environments, some warm and tropical, lasting thousands of years.
Most of the history of life had to do with a relatively close tracking of a changing environment. Note that if the adaptive landscape is deeply fissured for any reason, evolution may take on a progressive character.
Finally the idea that internal processes such as genetic and developmental constraints, coupled with the complexity of the adaptive landscape, resulted in a highly historically dependent evolutionary process.