The Role of Climate Change in Early Human Behavioural Evolution

It is widely recognised that all long-term species evolution is influenced by climatic and environmental conditions. These factors are relatively poorly understood for much of human evolutionary history, partly due to a lack of synthesis. Ecological Niche Modelling (ENM) offers archaeologists a method to generate global, continental and regional scale predictive models of human niche exploitation, providing the broad context for major evolutionary trends and synthesising disparate data from archaeological sites into a cohesive framework. This research will build models of early human occupation across Africa and Eurasia, focusing on a key period of human evolution and climate change within the Middle Pleistocene. The Middle Pleistocene encompasses defining changes in human behaviour and biology underpinning the later emergence of Homo sapiens including; technological innovations, repeated use of fire, extended childhood learning, increases in brain size and expansion in to higher latitudes. This follows a period of significant climatic upheaval, and through ENM this research will examine correlations between climate change, habitat change, and human responses, improving our understanding of the impact of Middle Pleistocene climate change on our evolution. Although ENMs have become established in the biological sciences, their application to archaeological data requires further exploration and refinement to better understand the inherent uncertainty in the models with implications for the scope of interpretations. This research will examine the challenges raised by chronological uncertainty, and explore how increasing model complexity may affect reliability in these extended time-spans.