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Scientific Drilling at Lake Tanganyika, Africa: A Transformative Record for Understanding Evolution in Isolation and the Historical Biology of the African Continent

Research Project
 | 
01.05.2016
 - 31.07.2016

With this proposal we propose to hold a workshop at the University of Basel in June 2016 to develop a strategy for conducting evolutionary biology and paleobiology (including ancient genomics) research on sediment drill cores to be collected from Lake Tanganyika, Africa. The Lake Tanganyika ecosystem is a textbook example of evolution and biological diversification in isolation, a result of its great antiqui- ty (over 10 million years) and persistence as a freshwater body (Salzburger et al, 2014). Over its long history, a rich and continuous fossil record of this evolutionary system has accumulated on the lake's floor. In collaboration with a large interdisciplinary team of international scientists, we propose to tap this historical record to understand how the ecosystems of both Lake Tanganyika and its surrounding watershed has developed. Scientific drilling on the African Great Lakes has already yielded exciting scientific payoffs in the fields of paleoclimate and paleoecological research, by extending our detailed understanding of African environmental change over a million years (e.g. Cohen et al., 2007; Lyons et al., 2015). With a drilling project at the oldest African lake, Lake Tanganyika, we have the opportunity to vastly increase both the research scope and temporal duration of these records. Fish and invertebrate fossils from Lake Tanganyika drill cores promise to provide both skeletal body fossils and ancient DNA records of the extraordinary endemic organisms found in this lake. When coupled with the precise geochronology and paleoenvi- ronmental records obtained from the same cores we have the op- portunity to produce transformative breakthroughs in understand the dynamics of adaptive radiations. In addition, the vegetation (pollen and phytoliths) and charcoal records from the cores will vastly improve our understanding of terrestrial ecosystem evolution in trop- ical Africa over the late Neogene, which is critical for understanding the context of our own species. That is, deep scientific drilling into the lake floor of Tanganyika will provide a climatological and environmental record that covers - in unprecedented precision - the entire time span of human evolution, starting from the human-chimp split, and in the very ge- ographic region where this event has happened.

Funding

Scientific Drilling at Lake Tanganyika, Africa: A Transformative Record for Understanding Evolution in Isolation and the Historical Biology of the African Continent

SNF Projekt (GrantsTool), 05.2016-07.2016 (3)
PI : Salzburger, Walter.

Members (1)

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Walter Salzburger

Principal Investigator