The 16th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place online on Friday 12th April 2024. The seminar was delivered by Stéphanie Bodin (Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt). In the seminar Stéphanie demonstrated how the examination of ancient charcoals found in caves used for shelter by hunter-gather populations living in Ethiopia at the end of the African Humid Period (4,000-2,000 years ago) can provide insights into vegetation and human selection of woody resources.
The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) special issue of Quaternary International (QI) will open for submission on 30 April and will close 30 July 2024. To submit your article go to the QI submission portal and click “submit new article”, you will then be asked to “select article type”. From the drop down list select “SI: Mapping Ancient Africa”. This will ensure that your manuscript is directed to the guest editorial team. Submissions should follow the standard QI guideline (click here for details) and take account of the advice for submission to this special issue (click here for details).
The special issue is centered around work and papers presented in the MAA Rome workshop and sessions at the INQUA Rome congress (session 1, session 2), however, if you have a manuscript that you think would be appropriate for inclusion given the research themes of the project please also consider submitting. If you have any questions feel free to contact the editorial team in advance.
The next Mapping Ancient Africa seminar will take place online at 17:00 CEST on 12 April 2024.
Speaker: Stéphanie Bodin (Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt)
Title: Hunter-gatherers and Afromontane vegetation in the Ethiopian highlands since the end of the African Humid Period
Related publication:
Bodin, S.C., Neumann, K., Hensel, E.A., Vogelsang, R., Demissew, S., Casas-Gallego, M. & Hahn, K. (2024) Afromontane forests and human impact after the African Humid Period: wood charcoal from the Sodicho rock shelter, SW Ethiopian highlands. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. DOI: 10.1007/s00334-023-00977-3
Casas-Gallego, M., Hahn, K., Neumann, K., Demissew, S., Schmidt, M., Bodin, S.C. & Bruch, A.A. (2023) Cooling-induced expansions of Afromontane forests in the Horn of Africa since the Last Glacial Maximum. Scientific Reports13, 10323. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-37135-8
The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack channel or by contacting the chair of this seminar (William Gosling). If you want to know more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project visit our web pages and please do not hesitate to get in contact if you want to get involved.
The 15th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place online on Friday 15th March 2024. The seminar was delivered by Bruk Lemma (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany; Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute – EBI). In the seminar Bruk presented recent advances made in the application of biomarker and stable isotope techniques in revealing the climate dynamics of the Bale Mountains in Ethiopia. He showed that it is possible to identify some plant types using these approaches, but that degradation of the signal in the sedimentary environment is possible.
A workshop will be held at the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi, Kenya) in June 2024. The aim of the workshop is to help authors prepare articles for the Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) special issue proposed for publication in Quaternary International and lead by Dr. Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr. The workshop will be associated with the “1st Joint International Scientific Conference” (3-6 June). The MAA workshop is being organized by Dr. Rahab Kinyanjui, and the congress organization is being lead by Dr. Emmanuel Ndiema (click here to watch his 2022 MAA seminar) and Dr. Esther Kioko (Acting Director National Repository and Research).
For further information on attending the MAA workshop please contact Rahab directly.
To find out more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project click here.
The fifteenth Mapping Ancient Africa seminar will take place on 15 March 2024 (17:00 CET)
Speaker: Bruk Lemma (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany; Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute – EBI)
Title: Nature’s Fingerprints: Exploring the Use of Biomarkers and Stable Isotopes in Unraveling Chemotaxonomy and (Paleo-)Climate Dynamics of the Bale Mountains, Ethiopia
The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack channel or by contacting the chair of this seminar (Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr). If you want to know more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project visit our web pages and please do not hesitate to get in contact if you want to get involved.
The 14th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place on Thursday 28th February 2024. The seminar was delivered by Mathias Vinnepand (Leibniz-Institute for Applied Geophysics Hannover, Germany) and presented recent advances in developing a chronology for the Lake Bosumtwi sediment record over the last c. 1 million years.
The first Mapping Ancient Africa online seminar of 2024 will take place on 28 February (17:00 CET).
Speaker: Mathias Vinnepand (Leibniz-Institute for Applied Geophysics Hannover, Germany)
Title: An age-depth model for Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana) to reconstruct one million years of West African climate and environmental change
Related publication: Vinnepand, M., Zeeden, C., Wonik, T., Gosling, W., Noren, A., Kück, J., Pierdominici, S., Voigt, S., Abadi, M.S., Ulfers, A., Danour, S., Afrifa, K. & Kaboth-Bahr, S. (2024) An age-depth model for Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana) to reconstruct one million years of West African climate and environmental change. Quaternary Science Reviews325, 108478. DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108478
The seminar will be delivered via Zoom. The link for the seminar can be obtained from the MAA Slack channel or by contacting the chair of this seminar (Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr). If you want to know more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project visit our web pages and please do not hesitate to get in contact if you want to get involved.
The 10th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place on Tuesday 7th February 2023. The seminar was delivered by Cecile Blanchet (Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam) and highlighted recent work linking river sediments from the Nile with change in global climate systems, including El Nino.
Blanchet, C.L., Osborne, A.H., Tjallingii, R., Ehrmann, W., Friedrich, T., Timmermann, A., Brückmann, W. & Frank, M. (2021) Drivers of river reactivation in North Africa during the last glacial cycle. Nature Geoscience 14, 97-103. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-00671-3
Blanchet, C.L., Tjallingii, R., Schleicher, A.M., Schouten, S., Frank, M. & Brauer, A. (2021) Deoxygenation dynamics on the western Nile deep-sea fan during sapropel S1 from seasonal to millennial timescales. Climate of the Past 17, 1025-1050. DOI: 10.5194/cp-17-1025-2021
Blanchet, C.L., Ionita, M., Ramisch, A., Tjallingii, R., Brauer, A., Laruelle, L., Bagge, M. & Klemann, V. (2023) Pacemakers of extreme floods during warmer and wetter climates of the “Wild Nile” stage. PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research SquareDOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3051876/v1
The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project is currently (late 2023 until early 2024) in the process of collecting submissions for a special issue of the INQUA (our sponsors) journal Quaternary International. The special issue will showcase research developed at the MAA workshop in Rome, and presented at the MAA sessions at the INQUA Rome congress. However, the editorial team is open to considering manuscripts relevant to the MAA goals that come from people not already involved in the project – so please contact us if you have ideas.
The process of developing articles for the special issue will be supported by the MAA community through a series of events. The first of these was a online workshop (2 October 2023) set out the frame of reference for the special issue, and included a short presentation on tips for structing a scientific article for this journal. If you missed the event and are thinking about writing an article for the special issue, or in a similar style, you can catch up with this on the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel. In person writing workshops are planned for 2024 in Africa. As full details emerge information will be published here.
Ecology of the past 