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Updated: Nov 3, 2025

Sampling and Pretreatment of Tooth Enamel Carbonate for Stable Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Analysis
Published on: August 15, 2018
Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans
Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr1,2, William D Gosling3, Ralf Vogelsang4
1Institute of Geosciences, University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany; kabothbahr@uni-potsdam.de.
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.
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