Abstract
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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | e2018277118 |
Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
Volume | 118 |
Issue number | 23 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 8 2021 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- African paleoclimate
- Hominin evolution
- Orbital forcing
- Walker and Hadley circulation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General