BIS 2B Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Homo Erectus, Neanderthal, Anthropocene

• School: UC-Davis
• Department: Biological Sciences
• Course: BIS 2B
• Professor: Mark Schwartz; Sharon Strauss

Document Summary

Professor will provide dates, periods, events (about 10), and we match period to age in order. Continue from last lecture: climate change driven by continental movement, orbital cycles, and changing greenhouse gasses rise of grasses and grasslands started > 20 mya. Big global grassland expansion about 5 mya in relation to mammalian evolution and origin of the homo genus key traits: bipedal, large brain, dentition. This rise of humans strong selection for brain size. Na has reduced percent survival of mammalia around 10 log kya. We can help protect or recover nature. Nature can adapt there"s an evolutionary response to human-imposed stress, both positive and negative. Re-thinking nature re-wilding = introducing surrogate species to perform ecosystem functions. Authors examined plants that had been studied in their native and introduced distributions. Plants where they are introduced often show increased plasticity increased competitive ability.