A temporally constrained re-evaluation of temperature inferences from Boomplaas and isotope records from Cango Caves: comments on Thackeray

The Holocene has been characterised by rapid climatic fluctuations. The climatic and biogeographical variations across southern Africa have presented challenges in accurately reconstructing the palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic record for this period. Difficulties have included the integration...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:South African Journal of Science 2016-07, Vol.112 (7/8), p.15-15
Main Author: Fitchett, Jennifer M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Carbon dating
Caves
climate fluctuation
Comparative analysis
Earth temperature
History
Holocene
Markov chains
palaeoclimate reconstruction
Paleoclimatology
Records and correspondence
Temperature
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Summary:The Holocene has been characterised by rapid climatic fluctuations. The climatic and biogeographical variations across southern Africa have presented challenges in accurately reconstructing the palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic record for this period. Difficulties have included the integration of palaeoclimatic reconstructions from multiple locations and the identification of contemporaneous climatic events. The improvement of dating methods has facilitated temporally well-constrained comparisons and reduced the margin of errors in the ascription of ages to environmental and climatic anomalies inferred from proxy evidence. To facilitate direct comparison between these two records, the radiocarbon dates for Boomplaas require calibration, and it is necessary to interpolate ages for the Boomplaas samples for which there are not yet radiocarbon or other dates. The previously published radiocarbon dates are therefore calibrated using ShCal13, with dates for the remaining samples interpolated by depth using Bacon, a Bayesian age-depth model using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation9 (Figure 1).
ISSN:0038-2353
1996-7489
DOI:10.17159/sajs.2016/a0161