Abstract
Abstract. The role that climate and environmental history may have played in influencing human evolution has been the focus of considerable interest and controversy among paleoanthropologists for decades. Prior attempts to understand the environmental history side of this equation have centered around the study of outcrop sediments and fossils adjacent to where fossil hominins (ancestors or close relatives of modern humans) are found, or from the study of deep sea drill cores. However, outcrop sediments are often highly weathered and thus are unsuitable for some types of paleoclimatic records, and deep sea core records come from long distances away from the actual fossil and stone tool remains. The Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) was developed to address these issues. The project has focused its efforts on the eastern African Rift Valley, where much of the evidence for early hominins has been recovered. We have collected about 2 km of sediment drill core from six basins in Kenya and Ethiopia, in lake deposits immediately adjacent to important fossil hominin and archaeological sites. Collectively these cores cover in time many of the key transitions and critical intervals in human evolutionary history over the last 4 Ma, such as the earliest stone tools, the origin of our own genus Homo, and the earliest anatomically modern Homo sapiens. Here we document the initial field, physical property, and core description results of the 2012–2014 HSPDP coring campaign.
Highlights
The possibility that human evolution has been strongly influenced by changes in the Earth’s environmental history, and in particular, its climate history, has been at the forefront of paleoanthropological research for the last 25 years
A series of workshops held in the mid–late 2000s better defined the specific goals of the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) and specific selection criteria for ideal drilling locations (Cohen and Umer, 2009; Cohen et al, 2009)
Its lakebeds provide a potential record of the local environmental response to the onset of high-amplitude climate oscillations and increased aridity in eastern Africa at ∼ 3.15 Ma as well as the response to Milankovitch cycles prior to the onset of high-latitude glaciation (∼ 2.7 Ma) as documented in the marine core record (Campisano and Feibel, 2007). This site provides a backdrop against which ∼ 400 kyr of the evolutionary history of Australopithecus afarensis (e.g., “Lucy”) and associated fauna and the earliest use of stone tools (McPherron et al, 2010) will be interpreted
Summary
The Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project: inferring the environmental context of human evolution from eastern African rift lake deposits. CD Utrecht, the Netherlands 36Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. Received: 31 October 2015 – Revised: 1 February 2016 – Accepted: 4 February 2016 – Published: 19 February 2016
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