Orbital controls on eastern African hydroclimate in the Pleistocene.

ABSTRACT: Understanding eastern African paleoclimate is critical for contextualizing early human evolution, adaptation, and dispersal, yet Pleistocene climate of this region and its governing mechanisms remain poorly understood due to the lack of long, orbitally-resolved, terrestrial paleoclimate records. Here we present leaf wax hydrogen isotope records of rainfall from paleolake sediment cores from key time windows that resolve long-term trends, variations, and high-latitude effects on tropical African precipitation. Eastern African rainfall was dominantly controlled by variations in low-latitude summer insolation during most of the early and middle Pleistocene, with little evidence that glacial-interglacial cycles impacted rainfall until the late Pleistocene. We observe the influence of high-lati

SUBMITTER: Lupien RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8873222 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature