Journal article
Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution
- Abstract:
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Despite more than half a century of hominin fossil discoveries in eastern Africa, the regional environmental context of hominin evolution and dispersal is not well established due to the lack of continuous palaeoenvironmental records from one of the proven habitats of early human populations, particularly for the Pleistocene epoch. Here we present a 620,000-year environmental record from Chew Bahir, southern Ethiopia, which is proximal to key fossil sites. Our record documents the potential influence of different episodes of climatic variability on hominin biological and cultural transformation. The appearance of high anatomical diversity in hominin groups coincides with long-lasting and relatively stable humid conditions from ~620,000 to 275,000 years BP (episodes 1–6), interrupted by several abrupt and extreme hydroclimate perturbations. A pattern of pronounced climatic cyclicity transformed habitats during episodes 7–9 (~275,000–60,000 years BP), a crucial phase encompassing the gradual transition from Acheulean to Middle Stone Age technologies, the emergence of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa and key human social and cultural innovations. Those accumulative innovations plus the alignment of humid pulses between northeastern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean during high-frequency climate oscillations of episodes 10–12 (~60,000–10,000 years BP) could have facilitated the global dispersal of H. sapiens.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 4.6MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41561-022-01032-y
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Geoscience More from this journal
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 10
- Pages:
- 805-811
- Publication date:
- 2022-09-26
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-08-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1752-0908
- ISSN:
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1752-0894
- Pmid:
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36254302
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1281433
- Local pid:
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pubs:1281433
- Deposit date:
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2024-05-10
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Foerster et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2022, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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