Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-19-2016
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.5194/sd-21-1-2016
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.
Rights Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Scientific Drilling, v. 21, p. 1-16
Scholar Commons Citation
Wynn, Jonathan and Wilson, J. N., "The Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project: Inferring the Environmental Context of Human Evolution from Eastern African Rift Lake Deposits" (2016). Geology Faculty Publications. 265.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gly_facpub/265
Comments
Complete list of authors:
A. Cohen, C. Campisano, R. Arrowsmith, A. Asrat, A. K. Behrensmeyer, A. Deino, C. Feibel, A. Hill, R. Johnson, J. Kingston, H. Lamb, T. Lowenstein, A. Noren, D. Olago, R. B. Owen, R. Potts, K. Reed, R. Renaut, F. Schäbitz, J.-J. Tiercelin, M. H. Trauth, J. Wynn, S. Ivory, K. Brady, R. O'Grady, J. Rodysill, J. Githiri, J. Russell, V. Foerster, R. Dommain, S. Rucina, D. Deocampo, J. Russell, A. Billingsley, C. Beck, G. Dorenbeck, L. Dullo, D. Feary, D. Garello, R. Gromig, T. Johnson, A. Junginger, M. Karanja, E. Kimburi, A. Mbuthia, T. McCartney, E. McNulty, V. Muiruri, E. Nambiro, E. W. Negash, D. Njagi, J. N. Wilson, N. Rabideaux, T. Raub, M. J. Sier, P. Smith, J. Urban, M. Warren, M. Yadeta, C. Yost, and B. Zinaye