Submitted by: Submitted by tkuchelmeister
Views: 10
Words: 1108
Pages: 5
Category: Science and Technology
Date Submitted: 04/09/2016 10:56 AM
Biodiversity and Environmental changes in Human Evolution
Todd Kuchelmeister
By understanding how and why our species has developed to where we are today scientists have developed many ideas on how environmental conditions stimulated long-term evolutionary changes. As life forms on earth have produced millions of diverse species, many that can be only found in certain area of the world has pinged mans interest for thousands of years as to how this has happened and what were the contributing factors.
This article discusses the hypothesis that key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability (Potts). How environmental change shaped the evolution of new adaptations and the survival or extinction of early species and the emergence of modern man.
In the article “Climate Effects on Human Evolution” paleoanthropologists developed many theories on why man survived and developed and how environmental conditions affected this change. One of the methods described to determine how the earth’s climate changed and how much, was to check the oxygen isotopes found in skeletons of foraminifera that lived on the ocean floors. Based on the amount of certain types of isotopes found in the skeletal structure they could tell if the earth was going through an ice age or warming trend by those numbers. There are two types of oxygen isotopes, 160 or 180, they are forms of the same chemical element, the only difference is one has more neutrons in the nucleus than the other. The ratio of the two isotopes changes as the temperature changes. When the temperature drops isotope 180 increases, in the skeletons of the foraminifera and more 160 isotopes are found locked up in the ice. To get these samples the scientists drill deep into the ocean floors to get core samples that contain the skeletal remains of foraminifera which they test to find out the composition. The scientists believe...