January 18, 2022
The third of a seminars in the Mapping Ancient African project took place on Monday 17 January 2022 and was given by Emmanuel Ndiema (National Museums of Kenya). You can watch the seminar now on the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel. Seminar details can be found here.
January 15, 2022
The third in Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) online seminar series will take place on Monday 17 January at 18:00 CET (20:00 EAT). This seminar will focus on the archaeology of eastern Africa.
The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack page, or from seminar chair and chaired by MAA hub coordinator Rahab Kinyanjui.
For further information on seminars in this series visit the MAA schedule page.
January 12, 2022
The new edition (December 2021) of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) newsletter “Quaternary Perspectives” is now available for download open access. Among the many interesting reports on Quaternary science contained within it is an update on the progress made by the Mapping Ancient Africa project written by the INQUA Palaeoclimate Commission chair Prof. Tom Johnson (thanks Tom!).
Download from: Quaternary Perspectives
December 16, 2021
The second in our series of seminars related to the Mapping Ancient Africa project took place on Monday 13 December. You can now watch the seminar given by Tyler Faith on the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel. Seminar details can be found here.
December 6, 2021
The second of the online seminar series associated with the INQUA funded Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project will take place on Monday 13 December at 16:00 (CET).
The seminar will be given via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack page, or from seminar chair and MAA hub coordinator Lynne Quick.
For further information on seminars in this series visit the MAA schedule page.
November 29, 2021
The first of the online seminar series associated with the INQUA funded Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project will take place on Monday 6 December at 16:15 (CET).
The seminar will be given via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA slack page, or from seminar chair and MAA PI Stephanie Kaboth-Bahr.
For further information on seminars in this series visit the MAA schedule page.
October 22, 2021
The kick off meeting of the INQUA funded Mapping Ancient Africa project took place on the 14 and 15 October 2021. This hybrid meeting linked up face-to-face meetings in Kenya, South Africa, Germany and the USA online. In total around 35 people participated in the meeting over the two days. It was great to start to get researchers back into rooms together, and to take advantage of the online link ups to connect people within regions who could not travel, and people in different continents. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce the researchers to each other and to start to think about how we can work together to deliver the project goals of collating and synthesising data related to past climate, vegetation and hominin activity from across the continent.
Continue Reading
October 11, 2021
To start discussion during the Mapping Ancient Africa kick off meeting (October 2021) lead author Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr has recorded an introduction to her recent paper proposing a novel tropical based climate mechanism for driving climatic change across Africa.
Kaboth-Bahr S, Gosling WD, Vogelsang R, Bahr A, Scerri EML, Asrat A, Cohen AS, Düsing W, Foerster V, Lamb HF, et al. 2021. Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(23):e2018277118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018277118
October 1, 2021
The first meeting of the, INQUA funded, Mapping Ancient Africa project will take place on the 14 and 15 of October 2021 with face-to-face meetings at four locations (Nairobi, Kenya; Port Elisabeth, South Africa; Potsdam, Germany; Portland, Oregon, USA) being linked up online.
For further information visit the project pages: https://ecologyofthepast.info/mapping-ancient-africa/
September 21, 2021
I am pleased to announce that the new, open access, volume of Palaeoecology of Africa (PoA) should be available to download in October. The “Quaternary Vegetation Dynamics” volume comprises 24 chapters, produced by more than 70 authors, and contains extensive review papers, personal perspectives on hot topics, as well as new research and data papers.
To find out more on the volume visit the publishers web site: PoA Vol. 35
Over the next few months I aim to blog about the various specific chapters to showcase some of the key findings. I hope that this book will provide a useful resource to all researchers working on past climate, environmental and vegetation change in Africa, and will provide a springboard for the start of the new “Mapping Ancient Africa” project that will kick off in October.
Ecology of the past 