Beschreibung
The Chew Bahir Drilling Project within the ICDP contributes to the study of linkages between climate, the environment and the evolution of humans in eastern Africa by providing the paleoclimatic basis. These data comprise long, high-resolution climatic and environmental records through critical intervals of human evolution (Late Pleistocene) and from a site close to places of important hominid remains finding. While there exist now several high-resolution proxy time series of aridity and general hydrological conditions in the Chew Bahir area (XRF-derived chemical element concentrations, magnetic susceptibility), there is an increasing need for suitable statistical tools to
- optimally analyse the measured data,
- robustly test hypotheses about changes in paleoclimate that may be related to human evolution and at the same time
- comprehensively take into account the full suite of uncertainties (measurement noise, proxy and age-model errors).
This project critically scrutinizes data quality and detectability of extremes to obtain a reliable and robust database. It develops and applies state-of-the-art, computing-intensive tools:
- block bootstrap resampling takes into account non-normal distributions and persistence,
- age model simulations are fused into the uncertainty determination and
- Monte Carlo methods test the suitability of the tools on artifcial data.
A novel research direction of this project is its consideration of climate extremes and risk analysis, since the response of humans to extreme conditions may be more relevant or the species’ development than mean conditions. The analysis tools and data will be made freely available.