ArticleNature2016
A progressively wetter climate in southern East Africa over the past 1.3 million years.
Article in Nature, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pleistocene terrestrial warming trend in East Asia linked to Antarctic ice sheets growth.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Research on the soil fractal characteristics and their correlation with soil properties in various forest types: insights from sub-humid area in Northern China.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The rise of baobab trees in Madagascar.Nature · 2024Article
- TheHorticulture research · 2024Article
- Zonal control on Holocene precipitation in northwestern Madagascar based on a stalagmite from Anjohibe.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Concurrent Asian monsoon strengthening and early modern human dispersal to East Asia during the last interglacial.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- The PaleoJump database for abrupt transitions in past climates.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Orbital controls on eastern African hydroclimate in the Pleistocene.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Contracting eastern African CScientific reports · 2021Article
- High diversity, inbreeding and a dynamic Pleistocene demographic history revealed by African buffalo genomes.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- A global database of Holocene paleotemperature records.Scientific data · 2020Article
- Regional impacts of climate change and its relevance to human evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Progressive aridification in East Africa over the last half million years and implications for human evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- A two-million-year-long hydroclimatic context for hominin evolution in southeastern Africa.Nature · 2018Article
- Article
- Environmental change explains cichlid adaptive radiation at Lake Malawi over the past 1.2 million years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
African climate is generally considered to have evolved towards progressively drier conditions over the past few million years, with increased variability as glacial-interglacial change intensified worldwide. Palaeoclimate records derived mainly from northern Africa exhibit a 100,000-year (eccentricity) cycle overprinted on a pronounced 20,000-year (precession) beat, driven by orbital forcing of summer insolation, global ice volume and long-lived atmospheric greenhouse gases. Here we present a 1.3-million-year-long climate history from the Lake Malawi basin (10°-14° S in eastern Africa), which displays strong 100,000-year (eccentricity) cycles of temperature and rainfall following the Mid-Pleistocene Transition around 900,000 years ago. Interglacial periods were relatively warm and moist, while ice ages were cool and dry. The Malawi record shows limited evidence for precessional variability, which we attribute to the opposing effects of austral summer insolation and the temporal/spatial pattern of sea surface temperature in the Indian Ocean. The temperature history of the Malawi basin, at least for the past 500,000 years, strongly resembles past changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and terrigenous dust flux in the tropical Pacific Ocean, but not in global ice volume. Climate in this sector of eastern Africa (unlike northern Africa) evolved from a predominantly arid environment with high-frequency variability to generally wetter conditions with more prolonged wet and dry intervals.
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