Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 23, Pages -Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2018277118
Keywords
African paleoclimate; hominin evolution; Walker and Hadley circulation; orbital forcing
Categories
Funding
- Open Topic Postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Potsdam
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [KA 4757/3-1, SPP 1006, SCHA 472/13, SCHA 472/18, TR 419/8, TR 419/10, TR 419/16]
- NSF [NSF-EAR1338553]
- Collaborative Research Centre 806 Research Project Our way to Europe [57444011]
- UK Natural Environment Research Council [NE/K014560/1]
- NERC [NE/K014560/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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The study reveals a close correlation between moisture availability in Africa and ENSO variability, likely driven by changes in Earth's eccentricity. Low-latitude insolation is identified as a key driver of pan-African climate change, impacting vegetation and mammal evolution.
In this study, we synthesize terrestrial and marine proxy records, spanning the past 620 ky, to decipher pan-African climate variability and its drivers and potential linkages to hominin evolution. We find a tight correlation between moisture availability across Africa to El Nino Southern Ocean oscillation (ENSO) variability, a manifestation of the Walker Circulation, that was most likely driven by changes in Earth's eccentricity. Our results demonstrate that low-latitude insolation was a prominent driver of pan-African climate change during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. We argue that these low-latitude climate processes governed the dispersion and evolution of vegetation as well as mammals in eastern and western Africa by increasing resource-rich and stable ecotonal settings thought to have been important to early modern humans.
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