Institute of Geosciences, University of Potsdam, 14469 Potsdam, Germany;
Institute of Earth Sciences, Heidelberg University, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Jun 8;118(23). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2018277118.
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.
在这项研究中,我们综合了过去 620 千年来的陆地和海洋代理记录,以破译整个非洲的气候变化及其驱动因素,以及与人类进化的潜在联系。我们发现,非洲各地的水分供应与厄尔尼诺南方涛动(ENSO)的变化密切相关,这是沃克环流的表现,很可能是由地球偏心率的变化驱动的。我们的结果表明,低纬度太阳辐射是中更新世晚期至晚更新世期间整个非洲气候变化的主要驱动因素。我们认为,这些低纬度气候过程通过增加资源丰富且稳定的生态过渡带,控制了东部和西部非洲的植被和哺乳动物的扩散和进化,这些生态过渡带被认为对早期现代人很重要。