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This anthropology professor examines how quickly humans adapted to climate change

Published: Thursday, February 23, 2023 - 10:42am
Updated: Thursday, February 23, 2023 - 11:42am
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There’s a lot of conversation happening now about how climate change is affecting — and will continue to affect — humans, and the societies we’ve created. But it’s possible to find some potential clues now by looking at skeletal remains.

Brenda Baker is a co-author of a paper on this. She’s an anthropology professor at ASU, where she specializes in bioarcheology, which combines biological anthropology and archaeology to focus on human skeletal remains from the past.

As part of this work, Baker and her colleagues looked at published research on human skeletal remains from a variety of archaeological sites spanning various periods of rapid climate change. They focused on a range of human adaptations from about 4,000 years ago, looking at things like health and nutrition and used that to draw some conclusions about how people adapted to periods of rapid climate change.

Baker spoke to The Show more about this.

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