Engineering Ecosystems: The Evolving Role of Hominins in their Environments

Bio:

Dr. Amelia Villaseñor links largescale ecological patterns and processes to human evolution from the Pliocene to the Anthropocene. She seeks to understand the place of hominins in past ecosystems and to elucidate when humans became large-scale ecosystem engineers; she explores the implications of these changes in human ecology for the anthropogenically altered future. She directs the Human Paleoecology lab and has numerous undergraduate mentees from a broad range of academic and life backgrounds.

Abstract:

Like humans, our close ancestors likely had outsized ecological impacts. Today, this culminates in a biodiversity crisis. But when did hominins shift from rare, omnivorous primates to global ecosystems engineers that top the food chain? Using data derived from large ecological databases, I will report on case studies that address two questions: 1) What is the role of the paleoenvironment in early hominin evolution and 2) How deep in time are human impacts and what are the ecological consequences of those impacts? Research from the Pliocene (3.6–3.4 million years ago) Turkana Basin in northern Kenya shows that water-stressed ecosystems may be an important part of the early hominin niche, possibly differentiating hominins from other apes. More recent in time, my research in North America captures the immigration of humans into North America (35 thousand–50 years ago) and shows that mammal community function was substantially altered as human populations increased. The future of paleoanthropological research and the answer to many pressing conservation questions is dependent on the continued use of these digital repositories.