A century of research reconstructing quaternary environments in east and North Africa and its global legacy

This paper explores a variety of different attempts to reconstruct Quaternary environments in East and North Africa during the last century or so and shows how the research on African Quaternary environments has also had an impact on Quaternary research worldwide. One important lesson is that the uncritical acceptance of a single climatic model developed in one continent, such as the glacial pluvial model from North America, and its wholesale application to another continent, such as Africa, can prove highly misleading and can (and did) retard progress in reconstructing Quaternary environments in Africa by many years. The most recent wet climatic interval in East Africa and the Sahara occurred between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago, following a cold, dry and windy climatic interval during the late Pleistocene, when lakes dried out across East Africa, desert dunes were active in the Sahara, and huge plumes of desert dust were blown into the Atlantic. The repeated changes in Quaternary environments in East and North Africa exerted a powerful influence upon early human adaptations and migrations, culminating in the emergence of Neolithic plant and animal domestication in the Nile valley and the Sahara and the flowering of early Egyptian urban civilization. •This study shows how reconstructing Quaternary environments in North and East Africa during the past century has had an important influence on global Quaternary research.•Accurate reconstruction of Quaternary environments in East Africa was initially impeded by uncritical acceptance of the glacial pluvial climatic model in vogue in North America and Europe.•The advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1960s led to a robust chronology for late Quaternary lake fluctuations in East and North Africa and the adoption of a more nuanced climatic interpretation.•Evidence from desert dunes, wind-blown dust, river and lake sediments, fossil pollen, fossil fauna, fossil soils, and prehistoric archaeology provided strong independent evidence that the arid climate in North Africa was interrupted by a wetter phase between about 15,000 and 5,000 years ago.•During wetter Quaternary climatic intervals in North Africa, when the summer monsoon was stronger, plants, animals and human groups migrated across the Sahara which was then covered in savanna woodland and grassland. These wetter intervals were controlled by the precessional orbital cycle.