ABCCycle · Awash Baringo Correlation and Cyclostratigraphy: Human evolution and paleoclimate

Awash Baringo Correlation and Cyclostratigraphy: Human evolution and paleoclimate

ABCCycle (Awash Baringo Correlation and Cyclostratigraphy) project Why This Research Matters: Understanding when things happened is essential for understanding how humans evolved. Scientists believe that changes the environment—like climate shifts—played a big role in shaping early human development and adaptation. But there’s a major challenge: we often lack precise timelines for these environmental changes. Without accurate dating, it’s difficult to test whether key evolutionary events were truly triggered by climate shifts. What the ABCCycle Project Aims to Do: The ABCCycle project seeks to tackle this problem by building a precise timeline (or “age model”) for two of the most important fossil-rich sites in East Africa: • Baringo/Tugen Hills in Kenya • Northern Awash region in Ethiopia These sites preserve critical fossil and archaeological evidence from a pivotal window in human evolution (between ~3.3 to 2.5 million years ago), including: • the emergence of the genus Homo • the appearance of the earliest stone tools. How They’ll Do It: The project integrates cutting-edge geochronological techniques to date layers of lake sediment layers that preserved records of past environments and climatic conditions. These include: • Relative Paleointensity (RPI): Measuring variations in Earth’s magnetic field intensity over time recorded in rocks. • Cyclostratigraphy: Detecting natural climate cycles —driven by Earth’s orbit— reflected in rock layers. • Magnetostratigraphy and Tephrostratigraphy: applying existing data on magnetic field reversals and volcanic ash layers to date sediments By combining these techniques, the project will link fossils and archaeological finds to specific environmental changes with unprecedented resolution. The Big Picture: With a new, high-resolution timeline in place, scientist will be able to: • Test whether climate change can be linked to changes in key evolutionary developments • Compare local environmental records to global climate data This is the first project to apply this integrated strategy to early human sites in East Africa. The results have the potential to transform our understanding of how climate shaped human evolution, and to serve as a model for correlating fossil evidence with global environmental change worldwide.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз