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

伦敦大学学院地球系统科学教授马克·马斯林 (Mark Maslin) 以研究气候变化为职业，并就该主题撰写了数百篇学术论文和多本书籍。 但现在，这位著名的气候科学家在他的新书《如何拯救我们的星球》中采取了一种截然不同的方法，他以最严肃的方式分解了我们每个人应该做的事情——不仅仅是为了保护地球，而是为了 还有很多其他原因，从经济储蓄到我们自己的健康。 我们最近有机会与 Maslin 教授就他的最新工作及其背后的灵感进行了交谈，为什么他对未来仍然非常乐观等等。

The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart pdf 马克·马斯林

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.