Climate Analysis of 2 Million Years Ago Using Supercomputer Published in Nature
[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Hye-seon] The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 14th that the research team of the Climate Physics Research Group at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), together with researchers from Germany and Switzerland, has elucidated the correlation between climate change and human evolution.
The research paper was produced using Aleph, the supercomputer owned by IBS, and was published on the same day in the world-renowned journal Nature.
Although it has been suggested through fossil and archaeological evidence that climate change influenced human evolution, the lack of climate-related data near human fossil sites has long left the clear impact of climate change as an unresolved challenge. The research group formed a team of experts in climate modeling, anthropology, and ecology to investigate the effects of climate change on human evolution from multiple perspectives. Using Aleph, the IBS supercomputer, the team analyzed the development and retreat of glaciers, changes in past greenhouse gas concentrations, and variations in Earth's axial tilt and orbital path to generate climate data such as temperature and precipitation spanning approximately 2 million years.
Through joint research, they created the most comprehensive compilation of human history, including 3,200 human fossil and archaeological samples from Africa, Europe, and Asia over the past 2 million years. By combining climate data with vegetation, fossil, and archaeological information, they constructed a spatiotemporal map estimating the habitats where hominin species, ancestors of modern humans, lived during different periods.
The researchers revealed that although ancient hominin species preferred different climate environments, their habitats all shifted in response to climate changes caused by astronomical variations occurring in cycles from 21,000 to 400,000 years. According to the research team, early African humans from 2 million to 1 million years ago preferred stable climate conditions and inhabited only specific regions. However, after significant climate changes 800,000 years ago, one hominin species, Homo heidelbergensis, adapted to a wider range of food resources, enabling them to reach distant areas in Europe and East Asia.
Additionally, the team investigated whether different hominin species could come into contact and coexist within the same habitat, deriving the genealogies of five hominin groups. This led to the estimation that modern humans, Homo sapiens, originated about 300,000 years ago from the late African population of Homo heidelbergensis. The climate-based lineage reconstructed in this study closely aligns with recent estimates derived from genetic information and morphological analyses of human fossils.
Notably, IBS Research Fellow Yoon Kyung-sook completed the longest-ever climate system model simulation using the Aleph supercomputer. This is the first continuous simulation employing state-of-the-art climate models covering Earth's environmental history over the past 2 million years. It captures climate responses to the expansion and contraction of continental glaciers, changes in past greenhouse gas concentrations, and distinct climate variations during the glacial-interglacial cycles occurring approximately 1 to 0.8 million years ago.
Axel Timmermann, the lead researcher, stated, "This study proves that climate played a fundamental role in the evolution of our Homo species," adding, "The reason humanity is who we are today is because humans have adapted to slow changes in past climates over thousands of years."
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