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Comment by thisisdave | Hacker News Reader

>Seven million years of human evolution were dominated by two challenges: food scarcity and cold.

Almost all of that time was spent in Africa. Even during glacial periods, was it ever icy? I don't know much about the paleoclimate, so I'm not sure.

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Adaptations can happen quite quickly. There are quite a few that the human populations which migrated out of Africa developed shortly afterward in response to new environments. Pale skin and retention of the ability to digest milk past childhood, for example.

Perhaps they should have specified that they were referring to specific populations of humans that evolved in the last few hundred thousand years, then. Seven million years ago, our lineage hadn't even split off from gorillas.

It would be very cold at night... in the deserts

I'm really not sure what "seven million years" actually refers to and it's oddly specific. Past a million years, you're talking about primates, not humans.

A great deal of Africa can get cold.

It snowed last year here in Africa, South Africa more specifically... It happens once in a blue moon, but other than that it can get really cold here. Just because you think savannah and dry-desert and Egypt when you think of Africa, doesn't mean it can't get cold there.

My understanding is that early humans were substantially closer to the equator than South Africa is, but you could be correct.

If it's raining it's possible to get hypothermia at 50 degrees F.

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