Proxy records from marine sediment and ice cores provide the basis for much of our understanding of past climate. To reconstruct climate over longer time-scales, scientists indirectly measure these components by analyzing various proxies, or indicators, that are sensitive to climatic or environmental parameters and preserved in the geological record. While it is ultimately local-level environmental processes acting upon individual populations that is one of the driving forces of evolutionary change, such shifts are often framed within the context of much larger regional or global climatic trends.ĭirect measurements of climate components such as temperature and precipitation only exist for the last century or two. Although various hypotheses and models have been proposed, refined, and/or abandoned for at least a century, the concept of environmental determinism and hominin evolution is still a hot topic today. The idea that critical junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been shaped by environmental factors has been around since Darwin.
