Category: Climate

Haplogroup Hot Switch

April 1, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Haplogroup I-M170 is a common Y chromosome DNA haplogroup among unnecessary tall males mostly situated in North and South East Europe. The descendants sharing this specific group of identical genetic traits all come from a unique male ancestor that lived approximately 22.000 years ago during…

Transient Dwarfism of Soil Fauna

November 30, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

It’s been well established that rising temperatures and CO2 levels in the environment tends to decrease animal size. But what about the keystone species and ecosystem engineers that make soil? Although there’s not been much contemporary research into this the fossil record allows us to…

Hyperthermal Shrinking

August 28, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Global warming has the potential to shrink the human species. As we’ve discussed before mammals, and many species of birds and fish, shrink when the climate heats up. During the last two hyperthermals, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago) and the Eocene Thermal…

Darwin’s Finches

March 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

If the human species embraces a desire to become smaller, as it embraced the desire to become taller in the past and present, then it is of some interest to know how fast this desire could influence human size and if desire alone is enough.…

Is Global Warming Shrinking our Brain?

August 28, 2010 By arne hendriks 2

This study by Jessica Ash and Gordon G. Gallup Jr. suggests that human cranial capacity as an indicator of brain size grew dramatically during our evolution, and that variations in global temperature as well as progressive shifts toward global cooling account for as much as…