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Alfonso Benito Calvo, a geologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is part of the international team that has just published a paper in the journal Nature Communications about the work at the Guefaït-4 site in Morocco.

This work reconstructs the ecological context of northern Africa 2.5 million years ago.

Through multiple analyses, this multidisciplinary research team has been able to show that this area had a diversity of environments where aridity was the dominant ecological context, but there were also forested areas, wetlands and more open spaces.

This paleoecological information is very important for understanding the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins in northern Africa and comprehending their adaptive capacity to the changing and ever more open environments we find in the African continent at this period.

Iván Ramírez-Pedraza, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the IPHES-CERCA, says, "Our results offer the first ecological framework known for northern Africa, where we did not previously have robust, tightly constrained data, unlike other parts of the continent such as the east and south."

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