High-resolution climate archives of the Late Quaternary in the Sahara
Subproject A2 in Collaborative Research Center 806 “Our Way to Europe – Cultural-Environmental Interaction and Human Mobility in the Late Quaternary”
Project leaders: Stefan Kröpelin, Bülent Tezkan & Martin Melles
Funding: German Research Foundation (since July 1, 2009)
Since the appearance of the first hominids in northern Chad around 7 million years ago, and especially during the Late Quaternary, the Sahara, located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea, has been the inevitable 5,800 km wide passageway for all migrations between tropical Africa and Europe. The complete subannual deposits at the bottom of Lake Yoa in Ounianga (northeastern Chad) provide the most accurate database to date on Holocene climate and environmental history. Multidisciplinary analysis of the drill cores recovered in early 2010, which cover the last 11,000 years, is currently underway. Further fieldwork is planned at other suitable locations in the western, central, and eastern Sahara in order to extend the results back to the beginning of the spread of modern humans around 190,000 years ago and thus to develop supraregional data on the paleoclimatic background of the archaeological subprojects of SFB 806 in Africa.