Evolution 101Evolution 101 provides the nuts and bolts on the patterns and mechanisms of evolution. An excellent walk-through of the basic concepts of evolution.
Evolution LibraryPBS' collection of multimedia resources about evolution.
NOVA EvolutionPBS' NOVA program series on evolution. Includes full episodes, supplementary video and audio, articles, interviews, and more.
Increased ecological resource variability during a critical transition in hominin evolutionAlthough climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated. We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a
major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site. Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores. Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover. Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of Homo sapiens foragers
Social Behaviour and Human Intergroup Tolerance 300,000 to 30,000 BP
Climate effects on human evolutionThis article explores the hypothesis that key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability. This idea was developed during research conducted by Dr. Rick Potts of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. Natural selection was not always a matter of ‘survival of the fittest’ but also survival of those most adaptable to changing surroundings.
