This proposal supports a two day workshop to investigate new lines of inquiry into the question ?Did African climate change shape human evolution?? Eighteen world experts in this discipline were assembled at Lamont in April 2012 to clarify the boundary conditions of the question and where advances can be made. The question carries with it some specific and novel lines of investigation so a workshop format would invite the most productive opportunity to advance this question. The meeting focused on Pliocene-Pleistocene East African climate trends, their variability, and evidence for evolutionary and adaptive changes in African mammalian taxa. The recent NSF funded NRC report on ?Understanding Climate?s Influence on Human Evolution? recommends ?a new level of integration of disciplines and training of scholars in ways that motivate the growth of a richly collaborative enterprise.? This workshop enabled these collaborations by gathering specialists from diverse disciplines with the expressed purpose of developing a research path forward to tackle this first order problem.
This award provided partial support for a conference held at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory on April 19-20, 2012. The meeting was announced to the general public and scientific audiences, and the website and agenda are online here: www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/meeting/Welcome.html This meeting convened leading senior scientists and early career junior scientists to discuss the central question: Did climate change shape human evolution. We invited 17 speakers who discussed new, emerging research in the diverse fields of paleoanthropology, isotope geochemistry, paleontology, and paleoclimatology. The meeting was attended by rough 125-150 people and members of the press were present and either wrote or blogged about the meeting topics. Many graduate and undergraduate students were able to attend the conference. The answer to our posed question was a resounding "maybe" as significant new results were advanced to support the case, but smoking gun evidence that climate shaped human orgins is still absent. At the end of the meeting, particpants brainstormed ideas about how we can solve this interesting and challenging problem. Suggestions and ideas were cultivated from all participants. These ideas were then summarized in a brief presentation to NSF directors and managers by Thure Cerling and Peter deMenocal. The objective of this summary to to communicate new proposed research ideas from this community to NSF as there is great, multidisciplinary interest in this research.
