Pilo-Pleistocene Tephra Correlations Between the Turkana Basin and Arabian Sea: Constraining African Climate- Evolution Hypotheses

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Title: Plio-Pleistocene tephra correlations between the Turkana Basin and Arabian Sea: Constraining Africa climate-evolution hypotheses. The early evolution of hominids may be tied to fluctuations of the climate in Africa, and the PIs wish to examine the relationship between climate and hominid evolution in the Turkana Basin of East Africa. The ages of hominid fossils are estimated by dating volcanic ash in the same sediments that contain the fossils. Volcanic ashes of similar age are also present in sediment cores recovered by the Ocean Drilling Program in the Arabian Sea. These deep sea cores also contain microfissils that record precisely dated climate history dating back to the earliest Turkana Basin hominid fossils. The PIs plan to correlate the ashes in the deep sea cores with an existing data set of ashes in the Turkana Basin, and to therefore give more precise ages of the hominid fossils, and to correlate changes in hominid evolution with changes in climate.