Moist and warm conditions in Eurasia during the last glacial of the Middle Pleistocene Transition.

The end of the Middle Pleistocene Transition (MPT, ~ 800-670 thousand years before present, ka) was characterised by the emergence of large glacial ice-sheets associated with anomalously warm North Atlantic sea surface temperatures enhancing moisture production. Still, the direction and intensity of moisture transport across Eurasia towards potential ice-sheets is poorly constrained. To reconstruct late MPT moisture production and dispersal, we combine records of upper ocean temperature and pollen-based Mediterranean forest cover, a tracer of westerlies and precipitation, from a subtropical drill-core collected off South-West Iberia, with records of East Asia summer monsoon (EASM) strength and West Pacific surface temperatures, and model simulations.

Regional impacts of climate change and its relevance to human evolution.

The traditional concept of long and gradual, glacial-interglacial climate changes during the Quaternary has been challenged since the 1980s. High temporal resolution analysis of marine, terrestrial and ice geological archives has identified rapid, millennial- to centennial-scale, and large-amplitude climatic cycles throughout the last few million years. These changes were global but have had contrasting regional impacts on the terrestrial and marine ecosystems, with in some cases strong changes in the high latitudes of both hemispheres but muted changes elsewhere.

Consistently dated Atlantic sediment cores over the last 40 thousand years.

Rapid changes in ocean circulation and climate have been observed in marine-sediment and ice cores over the last glacial period and deglaciation, highlighting the non-linear character of the climate system and underlining the possibility of rapid climate shifts in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. To date, these rapid changes in climate and ocean circulation are still not fully explained. One obstacle hindering progress in our understanding of the interactions between past ocean circulation and climate changes is the difficulty of accurately dating marine cores.

Pollen from the Deep-Sea: A Breakthrough in the Mystery of the Ice Ages.

Pollen from deep-sea sedimentary sequences provides an integrated regional reconstruction of vegetation and climate (temperature, precipitation, and seasonality) on the adjacent continent. More importantly, the direct correlation of pollen, marine and ice indicators allows comparison of the atmospheric climatic changes that have affected the continent with the response of the Earth's other reservoirs, i.e.

Identifying early modern human ecological niche expansions and associated cultural dynamics in the South African Middle Stone Age.

The archaeological record shows that typically human cultural traits emerged at different times, in different parts of the world, and among different hominin taxa. This pattern suggests that their emergence is the outcome of complex and nonlinear evolutionary trajectories, influenced by environmental, demographic, and social factors, that need to be understood and traced at regional scales. The application of predictive algorithms using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data allows one to estimate the ecological niches occupied by past human populations and identify niche changes through time, thus providing the possibility of investigating relationships between cultural innovations and possible niche shifts.

Orbital-scale climate forcing of grassland burning in southern Africa.

Although grassland and savanna occupy only a quarter of the world's vegetation, burning in these ecosystems accounts for roughly half the global carbon emissions from fire. However, the processes that govern changes in grassland burning are poorly understood, particularly on time scales beyond satellite records. We analyzed microcharcoal, sediments, and geochemistry in a high-resolution marine sediment core off Namibia to identify the processes that have controlled biomass burning in southern African grassland ecosystems under large, multimillennial-scale climate changes.

Testing the hypothesis of fire use for ecosystem management by neanderthal and upper palaeolithic modern human populations.

Background: It has been proposed that a greater control and more extensive use of fire was one of the behavioral innovations that emerged in Africa among early Modern Humans, favouring their spread throughout the world and determining their eventual evolutionary success. We would expect, if extensive fire use for ecosystem management were a component of the modern human technical and cognitive package, as suggested for Australia, to find major disturbances in the natural biomass burning variability associated with the colonisation of Europe by Modern Humans.

Methodology/principal Findings: Analyses of microcharcoal preserved in two deep-sea cores located off Iberia and France were used to reconstruct changes in biomass burning between 70 and 10 kyr cal BP.