Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 1 October 2018 doi:10.20944/preprints201810.0016.v1 Peer-reviewed version available at Quaternary 2019, 2, 4; doi:10.3390/quat2010004 Review A window into Africa’s past hydroclimates: the SISAL_V1 database contribution Kerstin Braun 1,2,*, Carole Nehme 3,4, Robyn Pickering 5,6, Mike Rogerson 7 and Nick Scroxton 8,9 1 Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University;
[email protected] 2 African Centre for Coastal Paleoscience, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa 3 Department of Geography, IDEES 6266 CNRS, University of Rouen-Normandy, Mont Saint-Aignan, France;
[email protected] 4 Analytical, Environmental & Geo-Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium 5 Department of Geological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa;
[email protected] 6 Human Evolution Research Institute, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa 7 School of Environmental Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, UK;
[email protected] 8 University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;
[email protected] 9 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +1 480 965 1077; All authors contributed equally and are listed alphabetically Abstract: Africa spans the hemispheres from temperate region to temperate region, has a long history of hominin evolution and yet has a relatively poorly understood Quaternary climate history. Speleothems, as archives of terrestrial hydroclimate variability, can help reveal this history, and here we review the progress made to date, with a focus on the first version of the Speleothem Isotopes Synthesis & Analysis (SISAL) database.