Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans
In this study, we synthesize terrestrial and marine proxy records, spanning the past 620 ky, to decipher pan-African climate variability and its drivers and potential linkages to hominin evolution. We find a tight correlation between moisture availability across Africa to El Niño Southern Ocean osci...
Published in: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences |
---|---|
Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format: | Text |
Language: | English |
Published: |
National Academy of Sciences
2021
|
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8201937/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34074756 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018277118 |
Summary: | In this study, we synthesize terrestrial and marine proxy records, spanning the past 620 ky, to decipher pan-African climate variability and its drivers and potential linkages to hominin evolution. We find a tight correlation between moisture availability across Africa to El Niño Southern Ocean oscillation (ENSO) variability, a manifestation of the Walker Circulation, that was most likely driven by changes in Earth’s eccentricity. Our results demonstrate that low-latitude insolation was a prominent driver of pan-African climate change during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. We argue that these low-latitude climate processes governed the dispersion and evolution of vegetation as well as mammals in eastern and western Africa by increasing resource-rich and stable ecotonal settings thought to have been important to early modern humans. |
---|