Ecology of the past

The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project has a double session of talks and a poster session at the INQUA congress in Rome 2023. Our session will be on Wednesday 19 July.

If you are at the INQUA Rome congress please come along to our talks and posters in Session 64: Mapping Ancient Africa: Climate, Vegetation & Humans.

Part 1: 08:30-10:30

• Giosan et al. When the desert was a lake: Providing context for Homo sapiens development in the northern Kalahari
• Chase et al. Paleolakes and socioecological implications of glacial “greening” of the South African interior
• Biddulph et al. Spatiotemporal variability in the initiation and development of peatlands across the central Congo Basin
• Blinkhorn et al. Evaluating refugia in recent human evolution in Africa
• Aureli et al. Homo sapiens behaviour and adaptation in East Africa. New evidence from an open-air site in a modern Ethiopian savannah environment: the GOT10 site
• Dembele Climatic fluctuations during the last millenium and their impact on political history and human settlements in West Africa
• Porchier et al. Annually resolved hydroclimate variability in the East African Rift Valley at a time critical for hominin dispersion
• Effiom et al. Late Holocene palaeoecological studies at Lake St Lucia, KwaZulu-Natal

Part 2: 11:00-13:00

• Tallavaara et al. Pan-African Climate and Vegetation over the Quaternary and Implications for Human Distribution
• Mashaka et al. Vegetation Reconstruction during the Holocene period in east Turkana Basin, using phytolith analysis
• Kinyanjui et al. Middle Pleistocene Vegetation dynamics at Yiapan, a high elevation extra-basinal Site complex: Significance to human behavioral adaptations
• Manzano et al. Holocene palaeoecological reconstructions of landscape dynamics at the year-round/winter rainfall boundary in the Cape Floristic Region (Southwestern South Africa)
• Mosher et al. High-resolution sedimentary charcoal records of fire link burning, vegetation change, climate, and pastoralism in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa
• Ntsondwa et al. Reconstructing the fire history and palaeoenvironment at Thyspunt, southern Cape coast, South Africa
• Julier et al. Filling the calibration gap: the importance of modern pollen studies from dry and transitional regions in Africa, and a case study from North-East Namibia
• Poretti et al. Investigating the potential of high-resolution carbon isotopes in archaeological Protea and Podocarpus charcoal as a rainfall seasonality proxy

Posters: 14:45-15:45

• Adamu Isa Climatic and Cultural Dynamics in West Africa’s Sahel: a view from Surame, Nigeria
• Asegahegn et al. A multi-proxy paleoenvironmental reconstruction from the southeastern Ethiopian highlands during the Late Quaternary, as recorded in the sediments of Lake Haramaya
• Boboye Coastal lithofacies appraisals of Quaternary sequences in Dahomey Basin, southwestern Nigeria: implications of the granulometrical, palynological and isotopic studies
• Fischer et al. A pan-African spatiotemporal framework of the past one million years using advanced multi-record time-series analysis
• Foerster et al. Towards Deep Drilling in the Turkana Basin (DDTB): Tracking the Environmental Forces Driving Hominin Evolution
• Gosling et al. The role of tropical climate systems in driving humidity during the African Humid Period
• Hlophe & Bamford Late Holocene vegetation and climate of Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, from charcoal
• Houngnon et al. Floristic clues to the origins of the Dahomey Gap from the Ewe-Adakplame forest (Benin, West Africa)
• Kaboth-Bahr et al. Tracing the impact of Walker Circulation changes on pan-African climate variability during the past 550,000 years using proxy and model results
• Kolb et al. Terrestrial ecosystem change during critical periods of early hominin evolution in SE Africa over the past 4 Ma
• Ogunfolakan The scar of migration: Sourcing for material evidences
• Orijemie Late Holocene Palaeoecology of Rainforest Reserve Sites
• Quick et al. Palaeoenvironments of the Cape Floristic Region: New research & current developments
• Vinnepand et al. An astronomical age model for Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana) to reconstruct West African climate and environmental change in the last million years

Further details of the congress can be found on the INQUA Rome congress web page here.

Other sessions at INQUA Rome with an African focus are (click here for information on all sessions):

• 15 July
  • Session 125: African Quaternary Anthro-environments: Palaeoecology and cultural responses to environmental variance
  • Session 128: African Acheuleans in the early Middle Pleistocene: triggers, techno-subsistences, time-lines
• 18 July
  • Session 70: Global and local views on the ecological, environmental, and climatic backdrop for hominin dispersal out of Africa in the early Pleistocene
  • Session 71: Quaternary of North Africa: chronostratigraphy and paleoclimatic variations
  • Session 102: West African Quaternary: understanding past climate oscillations and human responses to anticipate future adaptations
  • Session 163: Quaternary palaeoenvironmental dynamics/variability: promoting multiple proxy records from West-Central Africa