Humans are the only animal that lives in practically all possible environments, from tropical jungles to deserts and tundras. This adaptability is a skill that is much earlier to the modern era.
According to a new study published on Wednesday in Nature, the old Homo Sapiens developed the flexibility to survive finding food and other resources in a wide variety of difficult habitats before disperse from Africa 50,000 years.
“Our superpower is that we are generalist of the ecosystem”said Eleanor Scerri, an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoantropology in Jena, Germany.
Our species first evolved in Africa some 300,000 years.
While previous fossil findings show that some groups made early incursions outside the continent, Durable human settlements in other parts of the world did not occur until a series of migrations about 50,000 years ago.
“What was different from the circumstances of the migrations that were successful? Why were humans ready this time?”said study co -author Emily Hallett, archaeologist at Loyola University of Chicago.
The above theories argued that humans of the stone age could have achieved a single important technological advance or have developed a new way of sharing information, But researchers have not found evidence that supports him. This study adopted a different approach by observing the feature of flexibility itself.
The scientists gathered a database of archaeological sites that show the human presence in Africa for 120,000 until 14,000 years. For each site, the researchers modeled how the local climate would have been during the periods in which the ancient humans lived there.
“There was a really abrupt change in the range of habitats that humans were using from about 70,000 years,”Said Hallet. “We saw a really clear sign that humans lived in more challenging and more extreme environments”.
While humans had survived for a long time in the savannah and forests, they went to everything, from dense tropical jungles to aggregates deserts in the period prior to 50,000 years, developing what Hallet called a “Ecological flexibility that allowed them to succeed”.
While this leap in the skills is impressive, it is important not to assume that only the Homo sapiens did, said archaeologist at Bordeaux University William Banks, who did not participate in the investigation.
Other groups of the first human ancestors also left Africa and established long -term settlements in other places, including those that evolved until they became the Neanderthals of Europe, he said.
New research helps explain why humans were ready to expand all over the world in the past, he said, But it does not answer the lasting question of why.