Mapping Ancient Africa: INQUA Rome session

July 3, 2023
WDG

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

Continue Reading

AFQUA 2018 – day 4

July 17, 2018
WDG

AFQUA: The African Quaternary environments, ecology and humans
2ndInternational Conference and Workshops
14-22 July 2018-07-15 National Museum, Nairobi, Kenya

Day 4

Yesterday (day 3) was excursion day of the AFQUA conference (photos to follow). Day 4 of the meeting was back in the National Museum Nairobi and kicked off with a session on “African archaeological landscapes”. The opening talk reviewed the career of Karl Butzer who coined the term ‘geoarchaeology’ back in the 1970’s when writing about his work integrating geological, archaeological and anthropological information (C.A. Cordova). Two talks then followed highlighting work on Lake Makagadikgadi from the perspective of archaeology and landscapes (D.S.G Thomas) and geochemical fingerprinting of stone tools to determine their source (D.J. Nash).

To take us up to lunch Boris Vanniere and Daniele Colombaroli gave a ‘double header’ plenary talk highlighting the exciting advances in the development of the Global Charcoal Database and how understanding past fire histories in Africa is key to interpreting environmental change. The after lunch session continued the palaeo-fire theme with records from Lake Botswana (C.E. Cordova), Lake Bosumtwi (W.D. Gosling – me), and Madagascar presented (A. Razafimanantsoa); as well as work on the usefulness of the morphometric’s of charcoal in determining the plant of origin (L.Bremond).

In the final session of the day we were back to “Southern Africa” as a theme. Under which banner we were “boggled” by sea-surface and sub-surface temperature reconstructions (M.A. Berke), shown how to extract climate records from Hyrax middens (B.M. Chase) and given insights into the past flora of the Cape Floristic region from fossil pollen records spanning 130,000 years (L.J. Quick).

Blog at WordPress.com.