Towards a Quaternary tephrostratigraphy of East Africa

"The student will join field expeditions to Ethiopia and Kenya to core lacustrine sediments, and to sample tephra-bearing exposures and potential source volcanic rocks. Using laser-ablation ICPMS at Aberystwyth, and the electron-microprobe facility at Oxford, the student will characterise the geochemical composition of tephra layers and correlate them among cores and outcrops across the region.
The project is part of a wider research programme aimed at understanding how past environmental changes influenced the emergence and evolution of humans in East Africa, and their dispersal into Eurasia. Tephrochronology will eventually provide a critical chronological framework for relating past environmental changes to the archaeological record of human physical and cultural evolution in the region.
The programme is supported by the University of Cologne, and by ICDP, the International Continental Drilling Program. Deep drilling for 200,000 - 1 million year records from five sites in Kenya and Ethiopia will proceed during 2013-2017. The core sites are adjacent to well-known hominid fossil localities, including the Omo Valley in south Ethiopia, site of the earliest known fossils of anatomically modern humans. Cores from lake basins in the Ethiopian Rift Valley and the adjacent highlands are already available for study."