PLoS Biology: Climate-Driven Evolution
The Humans Who Went Extinct is firmly in the third, that is, classical ecological tradition. This admirable book is a summary and interpretation of human evolution from the first bipeds several million years ago to the earliest settled agricultural populations after the end of the Pleistocene. The title does not do justice to the scope of the book: there is only a weak focus on the extinction of the Neanderthals. It is an excellent summary of the classical ecological approach to human evolution with a dazzling portrayal of the relevant paleoclimatology, paleoecology, and biogeography.
These traditions ought to be complementary; instead they are rather isolated from each other. The discipline would be enriched if we acknowledged that the narratives that each tells are models and that models should be evaluated and falsified with data. There are numerous situations where models from the ecological and behavioral traditions compete directly, and such situations ought to be exploited for direct tests of the competing models.