Collaborative Research on Long Paleoenvironmental Records from Cave Sediments

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Growing international interest in global change has stimulated development of longer records of natural conditions in order to better compare naturally controlled change with the processes induced or accelerated by human activity. Scholars increasingly have gone underground in recent years, examining sediments in caves to determine whether pollen and microfossils in those deposits can provide long-term records of environmental conditions. This project will continue analysis of materials gathered in ten caves from seven different African nations. Preliminary analyses have estimated the dates of some of these materials to 350,000 years before the present. By continuing the process of estimating the age of materials and associating those materials with specific types of vegetation in regions surrounding the caves, project leaders should be able to more completely and more accurately reconstruct ecological conditions at the cave sites over long time periods. These reconstructions will then provide a basis for more accurate estimation of climate and other natural conditions in those regions. This research is significant because it will provide considerably more information about paleo-ecological conditions in different parts of Africa over hundreds of thousands of years. These data will complement long records gathered for other locales and dated using other methods of measurement, thereby providing an improved basis for examining the nature and processes of natural environmental change throughout the world since the Pleistocene epoch. This research also will increase knowledge about the paleoecological reconstruction methods used in this study and about the limitations in the use of cave sediments as sources of information about natural environmental conditions, knowledge that will help scholars examining environmental change in both historic and current timeframes.