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International audience; During the Pleistocene, tropical Africa was the site of significant hydrologic changes related to variations in the intensity of the African monsoon. The socalled African Humid Period (AHP) has been known for some time, the AHP is being revisited today with the aid of innovative geochemical and organic tools such as lithium isotope and molecular biomarkers which allow variations in precipitation and their impact on the formation of soil to be quantified. Recent studies conducted at a high temporal resolution (10-1000 years) in lake and deltaic sedimentary records in Africa have suggested that gradual long-term monsoon intensity oscillations were often punctuated by millennial-scale episodes of hyperaridity. It is suspected that these rapid episodes had (and will have) an impact on human populations, but this remains to be conclusively demonstrated. Deltas are mainly fed by the influx of terrigenous material from flooded rivers and are extremely sensitive to changes in precipitation, vegetal cover, and their catchment areas. The spatio-temporal study of the Nile delta’s sediments has demonstrated that approximately 90% of the herrigenous material deposited in the Nile deep sea fan originates from erosion of the Ethiopian Highlands, especially during wet periods. The geochemical (Nd, Li isotopes andTi/Ca ratio) and molecular biomarker tracers have revealed the rapid development of centennial hyperarid episodes occurred contemporaneously with cold intervals recorded in Greenland ice cores (i.e. Greenland stadials or Heinrich Stadials recorded in North Atlantic sediment. The nature of the links between weathering and these hyperarid episodes are still under debate. In particular, the timescale over which chemical weathering may respond to hydroclimate change is yet to be determined at the continental scale. We will present a synthesis of works recently performed in the Nile Basin, which strongly suggests rapid and significant variations of silicate weathering, and a dominant role of monsoon-precipitation variations in this region. We used Li & Nd isotope and GDGT tracers in a study that investigated sediment records from the Nile delta and Lake Tana (in the Ethiopian Highlands) for the last 110 and 16 thousand years, respectively. Our approach thus opens new perspectives for understanding hydro-climate variations in tropical Africa (long-term arid/humid periods and millennial-scale episode of aridity), and for determining their impacton sediment transport, continental weathering and soil development.

The role that climate and environmental history may have played in influencing human evolution has been the focus of considerable interest and controversy among paleoanthropologists for decades. Prior attempts to understand the environmental history side of this equation have centered around the study of outcrop sediments and fossils adjacent to where fossil hominins (ancestors or close relatives of modern humans) are found, or from the study of deep sea drill cores. However, outcrop sediments are often highly weathered and thus are unsuitable for some types of paleoclimatic records, and deep sea core records come from long distances away from the actual fossil and stone tool remains. The Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) was developed to address these issues. The project has focused its efforts on the eastern African Rift Valley, where much of the evidence for early hominins has been recovered. We have collected about 2 km of sediment drill core from six basins in Kenya and Ethiopia, in lake deposits immediately adjacent to important fossil hominin and archaeological sites. Collectively these cores cover in time many of the key transitions and critical intervals in human evolutionary history over the last 4 Ma, such as the earliest stone tools, the origin of our own genus Homo, and the earliest anatomically modern Homo sapiens. Here we document the initial field, physical property, and core description results of the 2012-2014 HSPDP coring campaign.

Multi-proxy analyses of an 8 m sediment core from Lake Hayk, a closed, freshwater lake in the north-central highlands of Ethiopia, provide a record of changing lake level and inferred regional climatic change for the last 15.6 cal ka years. Between ca. 15.6–15.2 cal ka BP, a lowstand was synchronous with Heinrich Event 1 and an intense drought across Eastern Africa. At ca. 15.2 cal ka BP a lake began to develop at the core site in response to wetter conditions, at the onset of the African Humid Period (AHP). However, in contrast to other lakes in eastern Africa, Hayk lake level fell around ca. 14.8 cal ka BP, indicating a climate shift towards aridity. The lake began filling again at ca. 12.3 cal ka BP and reached maximum water depth between ca. 12.0–10.0 cal ka BP. Lake level declined slowly during the Holocene, culminating in the termination of the AHP at Hayk between ca. 5.2–4.6 cal ka BP. In the late Holocene, ca. 2.2–1.3 cal ka BP, Lake Hayk was again deep and fresh with some evidence of short-term lake level variability.The palaeo-record from Lake Hayk indicates that while it experienced, to a broad degree, the same glacial-interglacial dynamics and sub-millennial shifts in climate found in other palaeolimnological records from eastern Africa, there are offsets in timing and rate of response. These differences reflect chronological discrepancies between records, as well as the varying climate sensitivities and site-specific factors of individual lake basins. This record highlights the different responses by lakes in a climatically vulnerable area of Ethiopia.

We used a change point analysis on a late Pleistocene-Holocene lake-sediment record from the Chew Bahir basin in the southern Ethiopian Rift to determine the amplitude and duration of past climate transitions. The most dramatic changes occurred over 240 yr (from similar to 15,700 to 15,460 yr) during the onset of the African Humid Period (AHP), and over 990 yr (from similar to 4875 to 3885 yr) during its protracted termination. The AHP was interrupted by a distinct dry period coinciding with the high-latitude Younger Dryas stadial, which had an abrupt onset (less than similar to 100 yr) at similar to 13,260 yr and lasted until similar to 11,730 yr. Wet-dry-wet transitions prior to the AHP may reflect the high-latitude Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, as indicated by cross-correlation of the potassium record with the NorthGRIP ice core record between similar to 45-20 ka. These findings may contribute to the debates regarding the amplitude, and duration and mechanisms of past climate transitions, and their possible influence on the development of early modern human cultures.

We describe the career of John Birks as a pioneering scientist who has, over a career spanning five decades, transformed palaeoecology from a largely descriptive to a rigorous quantitative science relevant to contemporary questions in ecology and environmental change. We review his influence on students and colleagues not only at Cambridge and Bergen Universities, his places of primary employment, but also on individuals and research groups in Europe and North America. We also introduce the collection of papers that we have assembled in his honour. The papers are written by his former students and close colleagues and span many of the areas of palaeoecology to which John himself has made major contributions. These include the relationship between ecology and palaeoecology, late-glacial and Holocene palaeoecology, ecological succession, climate change and vegetation history, the role of palaeoecological techniques in reconstructing and understanding the impact of human activity on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and numerical analysis of multivariate palaeoecological data.

This project was funded by grants from the UK Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC; grant nos NER/B/S/2002/00540 and NE/DO12996/1) and NERC Radiocarbon Facility support (NRCF010001 allocation number1201.1006). Climatic change is widely acknowledged to have played a role in the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, but the timing is contentious. Genetic evidence links dispersal to climatic change ~60,000 years ago, despite increasing evidence for earlier modern human presence in Asia. We report a deep seismic and near-continuous core record of the last 150,000 years from Lake Tana, Ethiopia, close to early modern human fossil sites and to postulated dispersal routes. The record shows varied climate towards the end of the penultimate glacial, followed by an abrupt change to relatively stable moist climate during the last interglacial. These conditions could have favoured selection for behavioural versatility, population growth and range expansion, supporting models of early, multiple dispersals of modern humans from Africa. Publisher PDF

The African Humid Period of the early to mid-Holocene (12,000–5000 years ago) had dramatic ecological and societal consequences, including the expansion of vegetation and civilization into the “green Sahara.” While the humid period itself is well documented throughout northern and equatorial Africa, mechanisms behind observed regional variability in the timing and magnitude of the humid period remain disputed. This paper presents a new hydrogen isotope record from leaf waxes (δD_wax) in a 15,000-year sediment core from Lake Tana, Ethiopia (12°N, 37°E) to provide insight into the timing, duration, and intensity of the African Humid Period over northeastern Africa. δD_wax at Lake Tana ranges between −80‰ and −170‰, with an abrupt transition from D-enriched to D-depleted waxes between 13,000–11,500 years before present (13–11.5 ka). A similarly abrupt transition from D-depleted to D-enriched waxes occurs ca 8.5–8 ka and is followed by generally D-enriched waxes throughout the late Holocene. Trends in δD_wax covary with changes in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation and reflect increased precipitation at Lake Tana during the AHP; however, the transition from D-depleted to D-enriched waxes occurs earlier at Lake Tana (ca 8 ka, vs 5 ka) than in many other regional records, and the amplitude of D-depletion during the AHP is larger at Lake Tana as well. We attribute this early enrichment to a reduction of moisture derived from westerly sources (the Congo Basin and Atlantic Ocean) which we suggest are D-depleted relative to moisture sourced from the east (Indian Ocean) and the north (Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea). Our new record highlights the importance of both the northward migration of the tropical rain belt as well as east-west migration of the Congo Air Boundary to precipitation source and amount during the African Humid Period.

The varved sediment profile of Lake Suigetsu, central Japan, offers an ideal opportunity from which to derive a terrestrial record of atmospheric radiocarbon across the entire range of the 14C dating method. Previous work by Kitagawa and van der Plicht (1998a,b, 2000) provided such a data set; however, problems with the varve-based age scale of their SG93 sediment core precluded the use of this data set for 14C calibration purposes. Lake Suigetsu was re-cored in summer 2006, with the retrieval of overlapping sediment cores from 4 parallel boreholes enabling complete recovery of the sediment profile for the present “Suigetsu Varves 2006” project (Nakagawa et al. 2012). Over 550 14C determinations have been obtained from terrestrial plant macrofossils picked from the latter SG06 composite sediment core, which, coupled with the core's independent varve chronology, provides the only non-reservoir-corrected 14C calibration data set across the 14C dating range.Here, physical matching of archive U-channel sediment from SG93 to the continuous SG06 sediment profile is presented. We show the excellent agreement between the respective projects' 14C data sets, allowing the integration of 243 14C determinations from the original SG93 project into a composite Lake Suigetsu 14C calibration data set comprising 808 individual 14C determinations, spanning the last 52,800 cal yr.