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Visiting Scientist Lecture: Past Climate Impacts on Human Evolution
Mar 4, 2025 at 9:00 am – 10:00 am
Dr. Axel Timmermann
Our genus Homo emerged in Africa 2-3 million years ago during a time of climate cooling and increasing glacial cycles. How early humans adapted to these disruptions remains a mystery. This seminar introduces numerical models that simulate dispersal, adaptation, and interbreeding, using paleoclimate simulations to explore climate’s role in human evolution. Axel Timmermann will show how Milankovic cycles created migration corridors that shaped today’s genetic diversity and discuss climate-driven depopulation events in Europe ( ~1.1 million years ago) and Africa ( ~ 900 thousand years ago).
By integrating paleo-climate, anthropology, and archaeology, we can reconstruct the human climate niche and examine how hominins became highly mobile and resilient around 800 thousand years ago, possibly linked to increasing glacial cycles and advances in tool use and fire-making. Recent efforts to incorporate climate and paleovegetation data into human origins research offer new insights into our past and raise important questions about how modern climate change may shape our future.
Speaker Bio:
Axel Timmermann is the Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University, South Korea, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship. Dr. Timmermann received his PhD in 1999 from the University of Hamburg, Germany. After 2 years as a postdoc at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and 3 years as research team leader at the IfM-GEOMAR/University of Kiel in Germany he moved to the University of Hawaii to work first as an associate professor and then from 2009-2016 as a full tenured professor at the International Pacific Research Center and the Department of Oceanography. In 2017 he launched the ICCP – one of the South Korea’s largest climate research centers.
Dr. Axel Timmermann was the recipient of the 2008 Rosenstiel Award in Oceanographic Science, the 2015 University of Hawai’i Regents’ Medal for Research Excellence and the 2017 Milanković Medal from the European Geosciences Union. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and has been listed consecutively as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher from 2018 to 2024. His more than 240 publications cover a wide range of subjects, including Quark-Gluon Plasma, relativistic hydrodynamics, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, glacial cycles, abrupt climate change, climate prediction, human evolution, isotope geochemistry, eco-cultural modelling and dynamical systems’ theory. Currently he is working on Southern African paleo-climate reconstructions, a model of terrestrial life and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Dr. Timmermann has conducted oceanographic, limnological and paleo-climate field work in the Arctic Ocean, on remote Pacific Islands, and in caves in South Korea and Botswana.