Speaker: Scott Wieman

He will be presenting on Timmerman and Friedrich (2016) and their modeling of past continental human migration.

Modern humans appear to have originated in Africa 200,000 years ago, but the first Homo sapiens didn’t leave the continent until 120,000. Timmerman and Friedrich (2016) explore the migration of our species across continents over the course of 70,000 years through a dispersal model incorporating climatic and sea level variations over these years. The authors use the LOVECLIM model to reconstruct paleoconditions and use these reconstructions to force their human dispersal model and create waves of human migration out of Africa and the Near East. Their results closely align with the archaeological and fossil records and suggest that orbital forcings were the main factor driving climatic changes favorable to human migration. While the model is idealized and our knowledge of the actual record questionable, Timmerman and Friedrich have brought to bear the most comprehensive modeling approached yet used on this problem and raised interesting suggestions about how early humans dispersed.