Geological evidence and geodynamic modelling suggest that the Nile river system has been largely stable since its origins ~30 Ma. The Nile could have provided a long-term migration route for vertebrates including hominins between Eastern and Northern Africa. However, other geological data contradict such an old stabilisation of the course of the Nile. Fieldwork along the middle stretches of the Atbara River, the last tributary to the Nile before it crosses the Sahara, provides evidence...

Understanding past variability and forcing of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) is essential for better anticipating its behaviour under future climate change scenarios and the resulting consequences for the subsistence of a large part of the world’s population. However, long-term high-resolution proxy records of terrestrial hydroclimate variability from the ISM core zone are still relatively scarce. To reconstruct ISM variability and associated vegetation changes in northern India during the last ~75 kyr, we analysed the...

The overall amount of metals and their variety used for technical applications has been subject to a steep increase during the past decades and is forecast to further develop. Growing metal demand for a wide range of high technology applications, including so-called ‘green’ technologies (e.g. PGM, REEs, Te) drives the economic value of these metals and the related mining efforts. For some of these metals, anthropogenic metal fluxes have outcompeted natural biogeochemical cycles, including plate...