Mapping Ancient Africa | Ecology of the past

Mapping Ancient Africa: Seminar 1

November 29, 2021
WDG

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).

Speaker: Prof. Martin Trauth (University of Potsdam)
Title: Northern hemisphere glaciation, African climate and human evolution
Reference: DOI 10.1016/j.quascirev.2021.107095

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.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Report of kick off meeting

October 22, 2021
WDG

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.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Paleo-ENSO

October 11, 2021
WDG

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

Mapping Ancient Africa: Kick off meeting

October 1, 2021
WDG

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/

Palaeoecology of Africa

September 21, 2021
WDG

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.