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Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans
- Source :
- Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(23):e2018277118. National Academy of Sciences
- Publication Year :
- 2021
-
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.
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00278424
- Volume :
- 118
- Issue :
- 23
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....ca0af3e221d77011d990a13373469e08