Kho hóa thạch từ 74.000 năm trước cho thấy con người có khả năng thích nghi đáng chú ý

In 2002, a crew of paleoanthropologists (nhà cổ nhân chủng học) were working in northwestern Ethiopia when they came across chipped stones and fossilized animal bones — telltale signs of a place where ancient people had once lived.

After years of excavations, the researchers discovered that hunter-gatherers (người săn bắt hái lượm) had indeed lived there 74,000 years ago. As described in a study published Wednesday in Nature, these ancient humans were remarkably adaptable. They made arrows to hunt big game. And when their world was turned upside down by a giant volcanic eruption, they adapted and survived.

That flexibility might help explain why humans of the same era (thời kỳ) successfully expanded out of Africa and settled in Eurasia, even when many earlier forays had failed. “This points to how sophisticated people were in this time period,” said John Kappelman, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas who led the new study.

Many researchers have assumed that such brutal changes forced people into refuges (thay đổi khốc liệt buộc người dân phải tị nạn) where the environment was more forgiving, and where they could continue to survive using their old practices. But that’s not what happened at Shinfa-Metema 1. There, the fossil (hóa thạch) record shows, humans adapted by giving up mammal-hunting as their prey died out and instead fishing in the newly shallow waters.

Dr. Kappelman questioned whether the deserts were quite so harsh, observing that the Nile brought some water through the Sahara to the Mediterranean. And while he acknowledged that a single site couldn’t speak for all of humanity 74,000 years ago, it offered a point of comparison for other researchers who might find similar ones.

source: nytimes,