ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Plio-Pleistocene environmental variability in Africa and its implications for mammalian evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lower speciation, not higher extinction, drove African megaherbivore diversity collapse.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Fundamentally unchanged northwestern African rainfall regimes across the Plio-Pleistocene transition.Science advances · 2025Article
- Arid, mosaic environments during the Plio-Pleistocene transition and early hominin dispersals in northern Africa.Nature communications · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
17 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding the climatic drivers of environmental variability (EV) during the Plio-Pleistocene and EV’s influence on mammalian macroevolution are two outstanding foci of research in African paleoclimatology and evolutionary biology. The potential effects of EV are especially relevant for testing the variability selection hypothesis, which predicts a positive relationship between EV and speciation and extinction rates in fossil mammals. Addressing these questions is stymied, however, by 1) a lack of multiple comparable EV records of sufficient temporal resolution and duration, and 2) the incompleteness of the mammalian fossil record. Here, we first compile a composite history of Pan-African EV spanning the Plio-Pleistocene, which allows us to explore which climatic variables influenced EV. We find that EV exhibits 1) a long-term trend of increasing variability since ∼3.7 Ma, coincident with rising variability in global ice volume and sea surface temperatures around Africa, and 2) a 400-ky frequency correlated with seasonal insolation variability. We then estimate speciation and extinction rates for fossil mammals from eastern Africa using a method that accounts for sampling variation. We find no statistically significant relationship between EV and estimated speciation or extinction rates across multiple spatial scales. These findings are inconsistent with the variability selection hypothesis as applied to macroevolutionary processes.
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