TY  - JOUR
A1  - Donges, Jonathan
A1  - Donner, Reik Volker
A1  - Trauth, Martin H.
A1  - Marwan, Norbert
A1  - Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim
A1  - Kurths, Jürgen
T1  - Nonlinear detection of paleoclimate-variability transitions possibly related to human evolution
JF  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
N2  - Potential paleoclimatic driving mechanisms acting on human evolution present an open problem of cross-disciplinary scientific interest. The analysis of paleoclimate archives encoding the environmental variability in East Africa during the past 5 Ma has triggered an ongoing debate about possible candidate processes and evolutionary mechanisms. In this work, we apply a nonlinear statistical technique, recurrence network analysis, to three distinct marine records of terrigenous dust flux. Our method enables us to identify three epochs with transitions between qualitatively different types of environmental variability in North and East Africa during the (i) Middle Pliocene (3.35-3.15 Ma B. P.), (ii) Early Pleistocene (2.25-1.6 Ma B. P.), and (iii) Middle Pleistocene (1.1-0.7 Ma B. P.). A deeper examination of these transition periods reveals potential climatic drivers, including (i) large-scale changes in ocean currents due to a spatial shift of the Indonesian throughflow in combination with an intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, (ii) a global reorganization of the atmospheric Walker circulation induced in the tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean, and (iii) shifts in the dominating temporal variability pattern of glacial activity during the Middle Pleistocene, respectively. A reexamination of the available fossil record demonstrates statistically significant coincidences between the detected transition periods and major steps in hominin evolution. This result suggests that the observed shifts between more regular and more erratic environmental variability may have acted as a trigger for rapid change in the development of humankind in Africa.
KW  - African climate
KW  - Plio-Pleistocene
KW  - climate-driven evolution
KW  - dynamical transitions
KW  - nonlinear time series analysis
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117052108
SN  - 0027-8424
VL  - 108
IS  - 51
SP  - 20422
EP  - 20427
PB  - National Acad. of Sciences
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Donges, Jonathan
A1  - Donner, Reik Volker
A1  - Rehfeld, Kira
A1  - Marwan, Norbert
A1  - Trauth, Martin H.
A1  - Kurths, Jürgen
T1  - Identification of dynamical transitions in marine palaeoclimate records by recurrence network analysis
JF  - Nonlinear processes in geophysics
N2  - The analysis of palaeoclimate time series is usually affected by severe methodological problems, resulting primarily from non-equidistant sampling and uncertain age models. As an alternative to existing methods of time series analysis, in this paper we argue that the statistical properties of recurrence networks - a recently developed approach - are promising candidates for characterising the system's nonlinear dynamics and quantifying structural changes in its reconstructed phase space as time evolves. In a first order approximation, the results of recurrence network analysis are invariant to changes in the age model and are not directly affected by non-equidistant sampling of the data. Specifically, we investigate the behaviour of recurrence network measures for both paradigmatic model systems with non-stationary parameters and four marine records of long-term palaeoclimate variations. We show that the obtained results are qualitatively robust under changes of the relevant parameters of our method, including detrending, size of the running window used for analysis, and embedding delay. We demonstrate that recurrence network analysis is able to detect relevant regime shifts in synthetic data as well as in problematic geoscientific time series. This suggests its application as a general exploratory tool of time series analysis complementing existing methods.
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5194/npg-18-545-2011
SN  - 1023-5809
VL  - 18
IS  - 5
SP  - 545
EP  - 562
PB  - Copernicus
CY  - Göttingen
ER  -