Terrestrial plant biomarkers and their carbon isotopes provide insights into carbon cycling,
paleovegetation and paleoclimate, ranging in scale from local to global. Over the past …

A central goal of paleoanthropology is understanding the role of ecological change in
hominin evolution. Over the past several decades researchers have expanded the hominin …

Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human
evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel …

The assembly of Africa's iconic C4 grassland ecosystems is central to evolutionary
interpretations of many mammal lineages, including hominins. C4 grasses are thought to …

The evolution of C4 grassland ecosystems in eastern Africa has been intensely studied
because of the potential influence of vegetation on mammalian evolution, including that of …

Paleoanthropologists have long speculated about the role of environmental change in
shaping human evolution in Africa. In recent years, drill cores of late Neogene lacustrine …

The hypothesis of a connection between the onset (or intensification) of Northern
Hemisphere Glaciation, the stepwise increase in African aridity (and climate variability), and …

Characterizing eastern African environmental variability on orbital timescales is crucial to
evaluating the hominin evolutionary response to past climate changes. However, there is a …

That fire facilitated the late Miocene C4 grassland expansion is widely suspected but poorly
documented. Fire potentially tied global climate to this profound biosphere transition by …

Understanding eastern African paleoclimate is critical for contextualizing early human
evolution, adaptation, and dispersal, yet Pleistocene climate of this region and its governing …