Paleo-ENSO impacted habitat availability for early modern humans

<p>In this study we synthesize terrestrial and marine proxy records spanning the last 620,000 years, to decipher pan-African climate variability, its drivers and potential linkages to hominin evolution. We find a tight correlation between moisture availability across Africa to Walker and Hadley Circulation variability that were most likely driven by changes in Earth&#180;s eccentricity. Our results demonstrate that low latitude insolation rather than glacial-interglacial cyclicity was the predominant driver of pan-African climate change during the mid to late Pleistocene. We argue that these low-latitude climate processes governed the dispersion and evolution of vegetation, as well as mammals, in eastern and western Africa, ultimately by increasing resource-rich and stable ecotonal settings that have long thought to have been the preferred habitats of hominins.</p>