The Evolutionary Ecology group, led by Prof Andrea Manica, is interested in how animals respond and adapt to changing environments. The same tools used to study other animal species can be applied to humans.

Research by the group and collaborators, reported in a paper published in Nature[LINK] today, shows how learning to thrive in diverse African habitats allowed early humans to spread across the world.

Using an approach they developed to study how large European herbivores, such as deer and wild boars, adapted to climatic changes during the last glaciation, the group looked at how humans’ ability to cope with diverse African environments changed over the past 120k years.

They found that 70k years ago our species suddenly expanded the range of environments they could thrive in, delving into the deeper forests and pushing into the drier deserts of Africa. This increase in their ability to cope with a large range of environmental challenges preceded the expansion out of Africa 50k years ago from which all contemporary humans out of Africa derive.  This likely explains the success of that expansion compared to earlier attempts to colonise Eurasia that left no trace.

The sudden change observed 70k years ago is likely the result of social adaptations, such as long distance social networks, which allowed for an increase in cultural exchange. This process would have been self-reinforcing: as people started to inhabit a wider proportion of the African continent, regions previously disconnected would have come into contact, leading to further exchanges and possibly even greater flexibility. The final outcome was that our species became the ultimate generalist, able to tackle a wider range of environments.

This research was supported by funding from the Max Planck Society, European Research Council and Leverhulme Trust.

Read more on this story on the University of Cambridge website: Learning to thrive in diverse African habitats allowed early humans to spread across the world

Image:  African Bush Elephant, Slon africky Loxodonta africana. Photo credit: Ondrej Pelanek and Martin Pelanek