Posted ,
Reading 1 min.
Just as some animals have done before, humans could shrink to adapt to rising temperatures caused by climate change.
Mammals that live in hot regions are smaller in size than those that live in cold regions. This would be particularly the case of the first horses, which lived about 55 million years ago.
Several studies prove it
“The reasons are not fully understood, but it is likely, in part, that smaller animals have a greater surface area to volume ratio than larger animals and can therefore conduct excess heat better”explains Professor Steve Brusatte, paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, quoted by the English newspaper The Guardian.
According to the researcher, these elements may lead one to suppose “plausible” that humans will be able to shrink to adapt to rising temperatures as a result of global warming.
This theory is of interest to other scientists. In July 2021, researchers from the University of Cambridge in (UK) and the University of Tübingen (Germany) published a study in the journal NatureCommunications.
The authors of the work studied the body and brain size of more than 300 human fossils. According to their estimates, temperature is one of the main factors causing the size of human bodies to change over the past million years. Clearly, the hot climate could lead to a decrease in corpulence, while the cold climate would produce larger bodies.
The impact of global warming on human height, however, could have other causes, for example, the availability of food and resources. This is the counter-argument formulated by certain researchers, in particular Professor Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum in London, also quoted by The Guardian.