The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) workshop in Rome will take place on the 12 and 13 July 2023. The workshop supported by International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) and hosted by the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. During the workshop we will be working towards aims of the MAA project to strengthen the research community of Quaternary scientists working across Africa, and to further our scientific goals of understanding past climate change. To achieve this we will work collaboratively to:
simulate past climate change in Africa,
develop the proposed Special Issue of Quaternary International, and
plan the next steps for the MAA project.
Twenty-seven people are registered for the workshop and we look forward to seeing them in Rome. If you are not registered for the workshop but still want to participate this is possible. On the 13 July between 15:00 and 18:00 CEST the workshop sessions will be online via Zoom. To obtain the Zoom link either visit the MAA Slack channel, or contact William Gosling. During the online part of the meeting we will present the outputs from the palaeoclimate mapping activity, the plans for the special issue, and outline the ideas future of MAA. Feedback from the wider MAA community will be very welcome.
The thirteenth Mapping Ancient Africa seminar was delivered by Andrea Manica on the 18th May 2023. In the seminar Andrea introduced the pastclim R package and gave examples of how it can be applied to address questions related to human evolution and dispersal.
Related publication: Leonardi, M., Hallett, E.Y., Beyer, R., Krapp, M. & Manica, A. (2023) pastclim 1.2: an R package to easily access and use paleoclimatic reconstructions. Ecography 2023, e06481. DOI: 10.1111/ecog.06481
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.
Ondrej Mottl and Suzette Flantua will be presenting an African Pollen Database (APD) practical tutorial about working with paleoecological data in R ! Please join us Wed, April 26 at 9am EDT (time zone converter). Please email sji15@psu.edu for the zoom link and instructions.
At this workshop, you will learn to use the new Ratepol package (info here and here):
search for APD sites from Neotoma in R
begin making age models
calculate rates of change for vegetation from pollen records
For more information, check out the schedule below and see past workshops here.
Having recently traveled to South Africa as part of the Landscape Dynamics field course run by our graduate school, and to be thinking again about trying to obtain funding to further research in Africa, I thought it might be fun to turn to the journals in which I have an editorial hand (Plant Ecology & Diversity, Vegetation History & Archaeobotany, and The Holocene) and see what new work was coming out on African ecosystem dynamics. From each of these journals I have selected two recent papers to highlight here.
The papers come from across the continent and all have a component of the ecology of the past, but they range in focus from developing methods to extract new insights about past ecological change (Le Moyne et al., 2023) through to the application of our understanding of past ecosystems to the management of conservation areas (Wilkinson et al., 2022).
The study by Le Moyne et al. (2023) examined modern reference material of nine grass species to determine how they might be better identified in the archaeological and palaeoecological record from the phytoliths they produce. Three of the studies use different lines of evidence of past ecological dynamics to explore change over the last few thousands of years.
Champion et al. (2023) shed light on past agricultural practices in western Africa (Nigeria) through the examination of macro-botanical evidence from 50 archaeological sites and dating back c. 3500 years, hypothesizing a new route for the spread of pearl millet out of the central Sahara into the central Nigerian savannahs.
Prader et al. (2023) present a c. 4000 year geochemical, palynological and and charcoal record from Table Mountain National Park in South Africa, showing changes in the abundance of fynbos and forest plants and how this was modified by people.
Hildebrand et al. (2022) collated multiple lines of evidence of past environmental change from eastern Africa to assess changes in human activity during and after the African Humid Period (15,000-5000 years ago), highlighting the complex relationship between changes in human resource acquisition practice (fishing, hunting, gathering, and pastoralism) and environmental change.
The longest timescale perspective is provided by Milton et al. (2022) who investigated plant speciation in the Namib Desert. They combined a phylogenetic, morphometric and experimental genetic approaches to explore the evolutionary history of Senecio flavus and S. engerianus and produce palaeo-distribution models. From these data they suggest that the wider ranged species (S. flavus) is in fact derived from the smaller ranged parent (S. engerianus) and that this separation was caused by aridification during the Pleistocene.
The final paper, Wilkinson et al. (2022), take evidence for past abundances of elephants and compare them with the abundances in national parks today. They argue that modern elephant densities in national parks could be higher than the historical levels and that this could be detrimental to the flora and other fauna in the parks.
The African Pollen Database community is hosting a series of workshops including practical data tutorials and discussions to help paleoecologists working in Africa integrate these data into research and teaching.
Our theme for Spring 2023 is “using R to understand African paleoecology”, and the schedule is posted here.
Our first workshop will be February 22 at 9am EST. Chris Kiahtipes will be provided a guided tutorial that can be followed live to help you use R and RMarkdown to develop reproducible research workflows for pollen data. This will be ~1 hour. Please register in advance by emailing Chris (chris.kiahtipes@gmail.com) to receive the zoom link and a guide to setup your workspace ahead of the workshop.
To see our launch meeting from February 8 that includes a tour of the African Pollen Database on the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, watch this video.
I am pleased to announce that we will be holding a two day Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) workshop at the “Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome” on the 12 and 13 July (just before the INQUA 2023 Rome congress). We invite all MAA members to participate. Workshops will be lead on the two days by myself, Stefanie, Rahab and Lynne. We will cover the development of manuscripts for the proposed Quaternary International special issue, and planning for the future of the MAA network (future meetings and potential grant applications). If there are particular items that you would like to cover during the workshops then please let us know and we will do our best to include them. This event will be designed primarily for “in person” activities, however, we hope to have opportunities for people to also link in online at some plenary moments.
IMPORTANT: If you plan to attend the MAA Rome meeting in person please email me to register with the words “MAA Rome event registration” in the subject line. I can then organize appropriate levels of catering.
Related publication: 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
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 9th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar, and first of 2023, took place on Thursday 19 January. The seminar was delivered by Celine Vidal (University of Cambridge) and showcased recent work on the dating of volcanic deposits to constrain the age of hominin fossils in eastern Africa.
Vidal, C.M., Lane, C.S., Asrat, A., Barfod, D.N., Mark, D.F., Tomlinson, E.L., Tadesse, A.Z., Yirgu, G., Deino, A., Hutchison, W., Mounier, A. & Oppenheimer, C. (2022) Age of the oldest known Homo sapiens from eastern Africa. Nature601, 579-583. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04275-8
Vidal, C.M., Fontijn, K., Lane, C.S., Asrat, A., Barfod, D., Tomlinson, E.L., Piermattei, A., Hutchison, W., Tadesse, A.Z., Yirgu, G., Deino, A., Moussallam, Y., Mohr, P., Williams, F., Mather, T.A., Pyle, D.M. & Oppenheimer, C. (2022) Geochronology and glass geochemistry of major Pleistocene eruptions in the Main Ethiopian Rift: Towards a regional tephrostratigraphy. Quaternary Science Reviews 290, 107601. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107601
Interested in African paleoecology? Want to incorporate African pollen data into your research or teaching?
If you read nothing else, please take this survey before January 25!
The African Pollen Database (APD) has been relaunched, and the Neotoma Paleoecology Database now contains over 200 APD records. Data stewards working with APD and Neotoma have been meeting regularly for the last two years to upload data, but we are now changing the format of our meetings in order to start focusing on helping people use APD data for research and teaching!
We are developing a schedule of practical tutorials on APD data workflows in R, using Rneotoma, and a few other topics to take place over next few months (see this video for general info).
This is open to anyone interested in African paleoecology (students, researchers, teachers, etc)! If you or your students might be interested in taking part in one or all of these, please take this very brief survey by January 25 to let us know. Also if you have other students or researchers you think should get this email, let Sarah Ivory (sji15@psu.edu) or Chris Kiahtipes (chris.kiahtipes@gmail.com) know.
Ecology of the past 