A workshop to examine the paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental framework of human evolution is being planned for fall 2005. Co-convenors are Gail Ashley, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Andrew Cohen, Craig Feibel, Richard Potts, and Jay Quade. We believe the time is ripe to bring anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists and climatologists, currently involved in the human evolution debate, together with the continental scientific drilling community. We propose to hold a workshop with a) paleoanthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists, b) geologists who have worked closely with the paleoanthropological community, and c) paleoclimatologists involved in collecting and interpreting sediment records. This workshop will integrate the record of hominin evolution and their ecological communities, local and regional climate change history and paleoenvironmental records from outcrop and deep drilling, We would focus this workshop primarily on the African record, where the longest and most continuous records of human evolution is found. The hominin fossil record reaches back in time to >6 million years ago and stone tools >2.6 million years, but the details of paleoenvironmental framework particularly on the continents are not well known. Traditional geological studies of hominin-bearing deposits have focused on correlation and chronology of sites, with usually only local sitebased descriptions accompanying each find. There have been few attempts to synthesize within regions or to place key sites within a broader temporal and spatial context. With the growing realization and understanding of astronomic climate forcing during the Plio-Pleistocene, there is an opportunity to integrate what is known about the paleoclimate and paleoenvironment from the continental geologic record and the evolutionary history from archaeological and paleoanthropological records. Broader Impacts Up to six advanced graduate students whose research involves an aspect of the Workshop topic will be active participants in the discussions. The experience they gain as members of different disciplines with different vocabularies, as well as seeing the variety of approaches to, and perhaps different interpretations of, the same data set will guide them in developing a consensual working hypothesis. The results from this workshop will be widely disseminated electronically hoping to reach a broad audience. The importance of the interdisciplinary approach and specifically utilizing "geoscience" in paleoanthropological research was highlighted by WoldeGabriel et al., in the July 2004 issue of EOS, a publication not normally read by paleoanthropologists. The article describes the need of groups that have not traditionally worked together to collaborate on problems that neither group are likely to solve on their own. The goal is to bring together researchers with a variety of perspectives on the role that climate and climate change might have played in human evolution. Topics such as these are interdisciplinary and often fall through the 'cracks' between normal funding programs. They are also short-changed by scientific societies in terms of critical mass at conferences and by publishing outlets. Extra effort must be made to get groups together who would not normally attend the same scientific meeting. This Workshop will help address this need.
