Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Hominin Sites And Paleolakes Drilling Project: Inferring The Environmental Context Of Human Evolution From Eastern African Rift Lake Deposits, Jonathan Wynn, J. N. Wilson

Geology Faculty Publications

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 …