ArticleNature communications2023
North African humid periods over the past 800,000 years.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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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
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Asian summer monsoon orbital variability directly paced by CO2 and precession, not eccentricity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The distribution of Earth's wind-blown sand dunes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Recovering signatures of archaic introgression using ancestral recombination graphs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates suggest multiple origins of ceramic technology in Early Holocene Africa.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Fundamentally unchanged northwestern African rainfall regimes across the Plio-Pleistocene transition.Science advances · 2025Article
- The archaeology of climate change: a blueprint for integrating environmental and cultural systems.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Orbital-accelerated transient simulations of glacial-interglacial climate cycles for the last 800,000 years.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Early warning signals of the termination of the African Humid Period(s).Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The Sahara region has experienced periodic wet periods over the Quaternary and beyond. These North African Humid Periods (NAHPs) are astronomically paced by precession which controls the intensity of the African monsoon system. However, most climate models cannot reconcile the magnitude of these events and so the driving mechanisms remain poorly constrained. Here, we utilise a recently developed version of the HadCM3B coupled climate model that simulates 20 NAHPs over the past 800 kyr which have good agreement with NAHPs identified in proxy data. Our results show that precession determines NAHP pacing, but we identify that their amplitude is strongly linked to eccentricity via its control over ice sheet extent. During glacial periods, enhanced ice-albedo driven cooling suppresses NAHP amplitude at precession minima, when humid conditions would otherwise be expected. This highlights the importance of both precession and eccentricity, and the role of high latitude processes in determining the timing and amplitude of the NAHPs. This may have implications for the out of Africa dispersal of plants and animals throughout the Quaternary.
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Registered trials
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