From Science, May 12 2023, “Human adaptation to diverse biomes over the past 3 million years”
“Our data-based diversity selection hypothesis may also add context to our more recent human history. According to our analysis, our genus Homo has adapted over the Pleistocene and migrated to areas with higher landscape diversity. Utilizing resources from various biomes provided a resilient and successful strategy over hundreds of millennia. However, during the Anthropocene, our species has caused a massive decline in global ecosystem diversity due to land use practices, gradually shifting away from integrated agricultural practices and toward monocultures. Modern humans have clearly taken an unprecedented path away from our ancestors’ resilience and diversity-based strategies.”
This paper offers a couple of tantalizing counters to the prevailing mythology of human evolutionary and migratory development. It emphasizes the importance of adaptability, rather than the myth of our adaptation specifically to the African savannah, as a possible marker of human evolution: i.e., the history of early humans is one of becoming adapted to the planet as a whole rather than any particular biome, and when we examine the hundred thousand year old parts of ourselves, maybe that willingness to take part in the life of the planet is what we should be taking away as our story, rather than the conventional supports of patriarchy, male domination and violent survivalism.
A second counter is to the idea of diversity including moving the human species out into space via what is being called technological human adaptation, but may in fact be anything but. Adaptation to diversity has to be measured in terms of what is available before and what after that adaptation: "adaptation" that moves a few billionaires and fools onto a planet inhospitable to advanced life, at the cost of further reducing diversity and the options available to the many on the home planet, cannot be categorized alongside the long history of humanity's adaptation to the biomes presented to it.
