Science Alert: Forget language, or smarts, or even our flair for art. Our species represents the last of its kind simply because we’ve pushed into environments others never dared to tread.
Two archaeologists suggest the global domination of a single species of hominin isn’t incidental – Homo sapien’s ability to flourish in extreme conditions was a key factor in our ability to outlast others in the genus.
Patrick Roberts from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and Brian Stewart from the University of Michigan describe a knack for being “generalist specialists” as the primary reason for our species’ success.
“A traditional ecological dichotomy exists between ‘generalists’, who can make use of a variety of different resources and inhabit a variety of environmental conditions, and ‘specialists’, who have a limited diet and narrow environmental tolerance,” says Roberts.
“However, Homo sapiens furnish evidence for ‘specialist’ populations, such as mountain rainforest foragers or palaeoarctic mammoth hunters, existing within what is traditionally defined as a ‘generalist’ species.”
With around 7.5 billion of us living in just about every ecosystem on Earth’s surface – and a handful high above it – you could mistake us for being a diverse mob.
As far as animals go, however, we’re pretty bland. Our genetic diversity isn’t all that great, and we don’t even have other species in our genus to sympathise with.
That wasn’t always the case. Depending on who you ask, we’ve shared the Homo genus with six other species across the millennia. And those are just the ones we know about.
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