Human are remarkably well adapted to survive the heat. But now the heat is outpacing our ability to adapt
. In the North Atlantic ocean, sea surface temperatures in late June are the highest ever recorded.
People shelter from the sun under umbrellas after visiting the Forbidden City during a heatwave in Beijing on June 24, 2023. Beijing recorded its third consecutive day of 40 degree Celsius weather, the first time since records began. Evolution’s next trick was developing a way for animals to deal with temperature fluctuations.
There are a lot of theories for why warm‑blooded animals evolved high, stable body temperatures. To name a few: a stable body temperature aids physiological processes, such as digestion and the absorption of nutrients; it helps animals maintain activity over longer periods of time; it enables par‑ ents to take care of precocial offspring. Warm‑bloodedness also allowed more precise and powerful functioning of certain cells in the nervous system, as well as in the heart and muscles.
In 1974, a pile of bones was found in the Awash River valley in Ethiopia by Donald Johanson, who, at the time, was a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. The bones belonged to a female human ancestor who lived about 3.2 million years ago. Judging from her intact wisdom teeth and the shape of her hip bone, Johanson determined that she was a teenager when she died.
The question is, what made Lucy stand up and start walking? It’s a much‑disputed subject among paleoanthropologists. A jet of water is used to cool down the Asian elephant lady Sundali at Cottbus Zoo. Animal keeper Yvonne Weigelt has been looking after 54-year-old Sundali for around 30 years. When temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius, the pachyderm prefers to stay in the shade or immediately in the cooler elephant house. At these hot temperatures, Sundali drinks about 200 liters of water a day.
For the Fongoli chimps, heat is extremely stressful. During the hot dry season in Senegal, which peaks in March and April, the temperature can hit 120 degrees. “The heat is like a slap in the face,” Pruetz said. Trees are leafless. Water is scarce. Fires burn across their territory. These chimps live in the hottest, most arid place that chimps are known to exist.
Pruetz has also noticed something else, something that was perhaps key to the whole human story: in the heat, the Fongoli chimps spend more time standing up and walking around than chimps that live in cooler places. But to take the next step in human evolution, to really allow our ancestors to range widely in the newly warmed world, they still needed one more key evolutionary innovation. They needed to learn how to sweat.
Dealing with heat was more complex. In warm‑blooded animals, more sunlight means more heat. More activity means more heat too. How far you can chase a wounded antelope in the heat depends on how well you manage heat. On the African plain, if you overheat, you go hungry. In addi‑ tion, our ancestors’ brains were evolving, and getting bigger. But big brains require a lot of cooling, and so developing a robust cooling system was important to advancing other skills, such as toolmaking.
But while our ancestors were wandering around in the heat on the African savanna, chasing down antelopes, they also perfected a much better heat management tool, which is the eccrine sweat gland. Instead of creating a lather, it is basically a mechanism to squirt water on your body, which will then evaporate and cool you off. It’s simple but brilliant. Hominins didn’t invent the eccrine gland. Old World monkeys like macaques have equal parts eccrine and apocrine glands.
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