ArticleNature communications2017
Modelling the role of groundwater hydro-refugia in East African hominin evolution and dispersal.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 75 citations in OpenAlex.
- What is groundwater?Hydrogeology journal · 2026Article
- The Pleistocene high-elevation environments between 2.02 and 0.6 Ma at Melka Kunture (Upper Awash Valley, Ethiopia) based upon stable isotope analysis.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- From evolutionary ecosystem simulations to computational models of human behavior.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Evaluating refugia in recent human evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework for the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Observed controls on resilience of groundwater to climate variability in sub-Saharan Africa.Nature · 2019Article
- 20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia.WIREs. WaterReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Water is a fundamental resource, yet its spatiotemporal availability in East Africa is poorly understood. This is the area where most hominin first occurrences are located, and consequently the potential role of water in hominin evolution and dispersal remains unresolved. Here, we show that hundreds of springs currently distributed across East Africa could function as persistent groundwater hydro-refugia through orbital-scale climate cycles. Groundwater buffers climate variability according to spatially variable groundwater response times determined by geology and topography. Using an agent-based model, grounded on the present day landscape, we show that groundwater availability would have been critical to supporting isolated networks of hydro-refugia during dry periods when potable surface water was scarce. This may have facilitated unexpected variations in isolation and dispersal of hominin populations in the past. Our results therefore provide a new environmental framework in which to understand how patterns of taxonomic diversity in hominins may have developed.
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Registered trials
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