ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Progressive aridification in East Africa over the last half million years and implications for human evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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20 citing papers in PubMed, 107 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Pan-Africanism vs. single-origin of Homo sapiens: Putting the debate in the light of evolutionary biology.Evolutionary anthropology · 2022Review
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- The climate and vegetation backdrop to hominin evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
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- A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework for the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Climate Stability Index maps, a global high resolution cartography of climate stability from Pliocene to 2100.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution.Nature geoscience · 2022Article
- Evolution of genetic networks for human creativity.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Review
- Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Ecological Changes, Social Behaviour and Human Intergroup Tolerance 300,000 to 30,000 BP.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2021Article
- Increased ecological resource variability during a critical transition in hominin evolution.Science advances · 2020Article
- Harsh environments promote alloparental care across human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The recent colonization history of the most widespread Podocarpus tree species in Afromontane forests.Annals of botany · 2020Article
- Regional impacts of climate change and its relevance to human evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Early hominins evolved within non-analog ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Animal residues found on tiny Lower Paleolithic tools reveal their use in butchery.Scientific reports · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
17 authors at 13 institutions in 10 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evidence for Quaternary climate change in East Africa has been derived from outcrops on land and lake cores and from marine dust, leaf wax, and pollen records. These data have previously been used to evaluate the impact of climate change on hominin evolution, but correlations have proved to be difficult, given poor data continuity and the great distances between marine cores and terrestrial basins where fossil evidence is located. Here, we present continental coring evidence for progressive aridification since about 575 thousand years before present (ka), based on Lake Magadi (Kenya) sediments. This long-term drying trend was interrupted by many wet-dry cycles, with the greatest variability developing during times of high eccentricity-modulated precession. Intense aridification apparent in the Magadi record took place between 525 and 400 ka, with relatively persistent arid conditions after 350 ka and through to the present. Arid conditions in the Magadi Basin coincide with the Mid-Brunhes Event and overlap with mammalian extinctions in the South Kenya Rift between 500 and 400 ka. The 525 to 400 ka arid phase developed in the South Kenya Rift between the period when the last Acheulean tools are reported (at about 500 ka) and before the appearance of Middle Stone Age artifacts (by about 320 ka). Our data suggest that increasing Middle- to Late-Pleistocene aridification and environmental variability may have been drivers in the physical and cultural evolution of
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