Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34074756.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.2018277118 and PMC identifier 8201937.
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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.
Medical subject headings
- Biological Evolution
- Climate Change
- El Nino-Southern Oscillation