Did Africa's Great Lakes boost our ancestors' brains?

The great flowering of human evolution over the past 2 million years may have been driven not by the African savannahs, but by the lakes of that continent's Great Rift Valley. This novel idea, published this week, may explain why every major advance in the evolution of early humans, from speciation to the vast increase in brain size, appears to have taken place in eastern Africa.

Anthropologists have surmised for several years that early humans, or hominins, might have evolved their unusually large, powerful brains to cope with an increasingly variable climate over the past few million years. However, studies testing this hypothesis have been equivocal, perhaps because most use global or continental-scale measures of climate, such as studying trends in the amount of airborne dust from dry earth that is blown into the ocean and incorporated into deep-sea sediments.

Mark Maslin, a palaeoclimatologist at University College London, and his colleague Susanne Shultz at the University of Manchester, UK, have taken a local approach instead, by studying whether the presence or absence of lakes in the Rift Valley affected the hominins living there. [...] newscientist.com/  (B&W3)

Citation: Shultz S, Maslin M (2013) Early Human Speciation, Brain Expansion and Dispersal Influenced by African Climate Pulses. PLoS ONE 8(10): e76750. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076750