Paleo-ENSO influence on African environmentsand early modern humans
- 1University of Potsdam, Institute of Geosciences, Potsdam-Golm, Germany (kabothbahr@uni-potsdam.de)
- 2Heidelberg University, Institute of Earth Sciences, Heidelberg, Germany
- 3University of Amsterdam, Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- 4University of Cologne, Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, Cologne, Germany
- 5Max Planck Institute for the Science in Human History, Pan-African Evolution Research Group, Jena, Germany
- 6University of Malta, Department of Classics and Archaeology, Msida, Malta
- 7Addis Ababa University, School of Earth Sciences, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- 8Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Department of Mining and Geological Engineering, Palapye, Botswana
- 9University of Arizona, Department of Geosciences, Tucson, USA
- 10University of Cologne, Institute of Geography Education, Cologne, Germany
- 11Aberystwyth University, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom
- 12Trinity College Dublin, Department of Botany, Dublin, Ireland
- 13University College London, Department of Geography, London, United Kingdom
- 14University of Copenhagen, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark
In this study, we synthesize terrestrial and marine proxy records, spanning the past 620,000 years, 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.
How to cite: Kaboth-Bahr, S., Gosling, W. D., Vogelsang, R., Bahr, A., Scerri, E. M. L., Asrat, A., Cohen, A. S., Düsing, W., Foerster, V., Lamb, H. F., Maslin, M. A., Roberts, H. M., Schäbitz, F., and Trauth, M. H.: Paleo-ENSO influence on African environmentsand early modern humans, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-2038, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-2038, 2022.
