Today’s post will be the last one in my series
about climate change and human evolution, and that’s why I would like to share with
you some of the thoughts I developed over the past months.
The reason why we study the past so meticulously
is not only to satisfy our insatiable curiosity – we also want to be able to
learn from the history in order to understand or predict the future. So, what
have we learned from this blog that can be applied for the future, especially
under a changing climate?
On one hand, I showed that our species was ‘born’
from climate change: our two main characteristics, bipedalism and a large, complex
brain were adaptations to environmental variability. Thanks to these features
we have become extremely adaptable and we were able to migrate, settle in all
kinds of environments and endure numerous climatic fluctuations. On the other
hand, I showed that such flexibility has not always guaranteed survival – all
but one of the Homo lineage vanished,
and a climatic factor is likely to have played a role in some of those
extinction events.
However, I haven’t mentioned a very important
fact about the relationship between people and climate. Thanks to our
intelligence and creativity we became the only species able to alter the
environment – including climate – to such an extent. In all my previous posts I
just wrote about the effects of climatic changes on our species, but I haven’t
explored how our species influences the climate.
The human impact on the Earth’s climate is an
unprecedented phenomenon and, let’s face it, we’re just starting to understand
it. That is why it is incredibly hard to predict what is going to happen to us
in the future. All the lessons from the past might become invalid when
confronted with the unparalleled rate of climate change and erratic human
behaviour. However, there is no doubt that never before have we had as much
power to shape the environment we live in. So, are we going to make the Earth
uninhabitable and doom ourselves to extinction, or are we going to use our knowledge,
adaptability and imagination to continue being the dominant, most resilient species?
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