Reconstructing vegetation at hominin fossil sites provides us critical information about hominin palaeoenvironments and the potential role of climate in their evolution. Here we reconstruct vegetation from carbon isotopes of plant wax biomarkers in sediments of the Nachukui Formation in the Turkana Basin. Plant wax biomarkers were extracted from samples from a wide range of lithologies that inc...

Arctic reindeer herders demonstrate resilience to climate fluctuations by adjusting their pastoral practices changing environments. The multiple phases of occupation at one the oldest identified reindeer-herding sites, IA^rte 6 on IA^mal peninsula, northwest Siberia, are thought be linked its local vegetation cover. Here we provide information palaeovegetation and shifts which occurred between ...

In the Bengal Basin, the land surface exposed during the last lowstand of sea-level around 20 ka, and now buried by Holocene sediment, is capped by an impermeable clay palaeosol that we term the Last Glacial Maximum Palaeosol (LGMP). The palaeosol strongly affects groundwater flow and controls the location of arsenic pollution in the shallow aquifers of our study site in southern West Bengal an...

Biogenic opal produced by vascular plants, diatoms, and siliceous sponges have been found in soils and terrestrial sediments of all continents except Antarctica since the middle of the 19th century. The opal particles range in size from fine silt to fine sand. Almost all soils contain detectable opal up to levels of 2–3%, and a significant number contain values in excess of 5%. Even higher valu...

Meteoric sphaerosiderite lines (MSLs), defined by invariant dO and variable dC values, are obtained from ancient wetland palaeosol sphaerosiderites (millimetre-scale FeCO3 nodules), and are a stable isotope proxy record of terrestrial meteoric isotopic compositions. The palaeoclimatic utility of sphaerosiderite has been well tested; however, diagenetically altered horizons that do not yield sim...

The Mississippian Derbyshire and North Wales carbonate platforms were formed in similar tectonic settings within the Pennine East Irish Sea Basin, respectively. Platform was surrounded by sub-basins to north, west south whilst Platform, 130 km west, had a simpler land-attached geometry. Comparison of these age-equivalent allows controls on sedimentation, at an important juncture Earth history, ...

Palaeosols in the Granada Basin (SE Spain) have been studied in two different situations: surface soils on geomorphically stable surfaces since the Early Pleistocene with younger pedogenic overprinting and buried soils on unstable surfaces from the Middle–Late Pleistocene on which successive erosional–depositional episodes have alternated with pedogenic episodes. For each soil clay and iron acc...

The link between atmospheric CO(2) levels and global warming is an axiom of current public policy, and is well supported by physicochemical experiments, by comparative planetary climatology and by geochemical modelling. Geological tests of this idea seek to compare proxies of past atmospheric CO(2) with other proxies of palaeotemperature. For at least the past 300 Myr, there is a remarkably hig...