Climate History

An article on A Students Guide to Global Climate Change claims that the levels of carbon dioxide and warm temperatures have gone through a cyclical pattern. There are periods where the temps and carbon dioxide levels have risen and then gone down to rising again. I kept reading and saw that humans have obviously been affected by this cycle but it did not specify how we were affected. This got me thinking about how were humans affected by the hot/cold cycle.

I then saw an article on the online smithsonian magazine and noticed an interesting trend between the climate and human evolution. Researchers have linked the first first evolution of humans and the second evolution to times when the climate was going under drastic changes. The first evolution was when the Homo genus first appeared with small brains and the construction of simple tools. The second evolution was when there was another drastic change in the climate and the Homo erectus made their appearance. They had bigger brains and were capable of making double headed axes and more complex tools than the Homo genus.

All of my research so far has been overlapping with the science side of the climate but I am more interested into what historians see in terms of the word climate. It turned out that I was not the only one that thought "so what?" about climate change. Washington University in Saint Louis offers to students linking natural history to human history. This article is a good place for me to start and I am looking forward to see what I can find on the internet about historians and climate.