East African megadroughts between 135 and 75 thousand years ago and bearing on early-modern human origins.

ABSTRACT: The environmental backdrop to the evolution and spread of early Homo sapiens in East Africa is known mainly from isolated outcrops and distant marine sediment cores. Here we present results from new scientific drill cores from Lake Malawi, the first long and continuous, high-fidelity records of tropical climate change from the continent itself. Our record shows periods of severe aridity between 135 and 75 thousand years (kyr) ago, when the lake's water volume was reduced by at least 95%. Surprisingly, these intervals of pronounced tropical African aridity in the early late-Pleistocene were much more severe than the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the period previously recognized as one of the most arid of the Quaternary. From these cores and from records from Lakes Tanganyika (East Africa) and

SUBMITTER: Scholz CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1964544 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature