The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart pdf

Mark Maslin, professeur de sciences du système terrestre à l'University College de Londres, a fait carrière dans l'étude du changement climatique et est l'auteur de centaines d'articles universitaires et de plusieurs livres sur le sujet. Mais maintenant, le célèbre climatologue a adopté une approche assez différente avec son nouveau livre, Comment sauver notre planète, où il décompose de la manière la plus simple ce que nous devrions chacun faire - non seulement pour protéger la Terre, mais pour une foule d'autres raisons, des économies économiques à notre propre santé. Nous avons récemment eu l'occasion de parler au professeur Maslin de son dernier travail et de l'inspiration qui le sous-tend, pourquoi il reste incroyablement optimiste quant à l'avenir et bien plus encore.

The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart pdf par Mark Maslin

One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did evolution favour the brainy ape? This question has been widely debated among biological anthropologists, and in recent years, Maslin and his colleagues have pioneered a new theory that might just be the answer. Looking back to a crucial period some 1.9 million years ago, when brain capacity increased by as much as 80%, The Cradle of Humanity explores the implications of two adaptive responses by our hominin ancestors to rapid climatic changes - big jaws, and big brains. Maslin argues that the impact of changing landscapes and fluctuating climates that led to the appearance of intermittent freshwater lakes in East Africa may have played a key role in human evolution. Alongside the physical evidence of fossils and tools, he considers social theories of why a large, complex brain would have provided a major advantage when trying to survive in the constantly changing East African landscape.