Mapping Ancient Africa | Ecology of the past

Mapping Ancient Africa: Seminar 14

February 28, 2024
WDG

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 Reviews 325, 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.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Video of Seminar 10

January 12, 2024
WDG

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.

Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.

References

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 Square DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3051876/v1

Mapping Ancient Africa: Structuring a scientific article

December 19, 2023
WDG

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.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Scientists (part 3)

September 1, 2023
WDG

The third instalment of interviews with Mapping Ancient Africa scientists is now available. Watch ‘the final four’ below, and check out the other videos by clicking on the names below:

Interview 10: Markus Fisher (University of Potsdam)

Interview 11: Soléne Boisard (University of Montréal) – in French

Interview 12: Trevor Hill (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

Interview 13: Jemma Finch (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

To find out more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project click here.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Special Issue

August 31, 2023
WDG

Mapping Ancient Africa participants on the Rome workshop (2023)

The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project has an open call for contributions to a Special Issue of Quaternary International; the journal of our funder the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA). The concept for the special issue is agreed in principle with the journals editor-in-chief so now it is our task to collate a collection of manuscripts suitable to published in this international peer reviewed journal. The special issue will be based around papers discussed and presented at the MAA workshop in Rome and session at the INQUA congress in Rome in July 2023, but we are also happy to consider other manuscripts that fit within the MAA project area.

To find out if your manuscript idea might fit either explore the MAA web pages or contact a member of the editorial team:

Mapping Ancient Africa: Scientists (part 2)

August 28, 2023
WDG

The next four interviews with scientists who participated in the Mapping Ancient Africa workshop in Rome (2023) are now online (see below). You can find more interviews with scientists by clicking the names below:

Interview 6: Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr (Free University of Berlin)

Interview 7: Mathais Vinnepand (Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz)

Interview 8: Rahab Kinyanjui (National Museums of Kenya & Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology)

Interview 9: Manu Chevalier (University of Bonn)

To check out all the Mapping Ancient Africa video content visit out the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel.

To find out more about the MAA Rome workshop follow links from here.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Scientists

August 25, 2023
WDG

During the Mapping Ancient Africa workshop in Rome I conducted short interviews with the scientists involved. The first of these, Alfred Houngnon can be viewed here, below are four more, and more will follow as I get them uploaded. I hope they provide interesting insights into the diverse range of skills and backgrounds our scientists have.

Interview 2: Busisiwe Hlophe (University of the Witwatersrand)

Interview 3: Angela Effion (University of the Witwatersrand)

Interview 4: Bahru Zinaye Asegahegn (University of Cologne)

Interview 5: Michela Leonardi (University of Cambridge)

To find out more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project click here.

Mapping Ancient Africa: INQUA Rome – session 2

August 24, 2023
WDG

The second part of the Mapping Ancient Africa session at the INQUA Rome congress contained eight talks. Busisiwe Hlophe (University of the Witwatersrand) kicked us off by showing us the power of looking at wood anatomy preserved in charcoal microfossils to determine the nature of past vegetation and climate. Rahab Kinyanjui (National Museums of Kenya) presented phytolith work from archaeological sites revealing a mixed woody and grassy vegetation associated with archaic Homo sapiens in Kenya.

Three talks from the Cape Region in South Africa then followed with Saul Manzano (University of Leon), Stella Moscher (University of Utah), and Asithandile Ntsondwa (Nelson Mandela University) using various palaeo ecological approaches to explore climate, vegetation and fire regime shifts during the Holocene. Adele Julier (University of Portsmouth) then took us a little further north to Namibia to think about the challenges of parameterising modern pollen-vegetation relationships in arid regions. The final southern African talk was given by Gemma Poretti (University of Cape Town) explored a new approache to tracking change in past rainfall patterns using charcoal material.

Mapping Ancient Africa: INQUA Rome – session 1

August 18, 2023
WDG

On Wednesday 19 July 2023 the Mapping Ancient Africa session of the INQUA Rome congress took place. We were delighted to have an full program of speakers despite some late cancellations. The first session featured seven speakers.

The first two talks focused on southern Africa. The first talk by Liviu Giosan (Woodshole Oceanographic Institute) focused on new sediment cores extracted from the Okavango – Makgadikgadi region and new efforts to obtain sediment cores that can provide information on the dispersal of hominins. Brian Chase (CNRS) then looks us to the Karoo highlighting recent findings that suggest that this currently arid region was more habitable in the past and that a proliferation of stone tools suggests past peoples utilised the region extensively (Carr et al., 2023).

Mapping Ancient Africa: Scientists – Alfred Houngnon

August 15, 2023
WDG

My name’s Alfred Houngnon, native of Benin Republic in West Africa. I hold an agricultural engineering degree in “Rangeland Management and Conservation” (Abomey-Calavi University). After gaining relevant field experience, I obtained a French Government Bursary to pursue an MSc degree in “Tropical Plant Biodiversity” at Montpellier (France). There, I learned about how to use indicators of past environmental and climatic change to give insights into projected future change.

It was a great scientific experience to participate in-person at the XXI INQUA Congress 2023 in Rome (Italy). This opportunity came under the supervision of William Gosling, and with the support of the Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project funded by INQUA’s Palaeoclimate commission (PALCOM). I have been working with Will for a number of years and published a first paper related to this work in 2021; a checklist of vascular plants from a ‘relict’ forest in Benin (Houngnon et al., 2021). A second manuscript is under development and was accepted for poster and oral presentation at INQUA 2023 congress that brought together around 4000 abstracts.

Interview 1: Alfred Houngnon (AGIR)

The bursary from the MAA project allowed me to also attend the MAA Rome workshops held at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (12-13 July 2023). During the workshops, I was trained in two novel approaches to palaeoclimate modeling. The first based on interfacing paleoclimate models through the “pastclim” R package (Michela Leonardi), and the second on reconstructing palaeoclimates on the basis of ancient pollen data using the “CREST” program (Manu Chevalier). The workshops helped me to sharpen the communication of my ideas and in so doing strengthened the manuscript in preparation for submission to an international journal for publication.