Tsige Gebru Kassa

University of Cologne | UOC · Institute of Geography

Sediment records from two lakes in the biodiversity hotspot of the Southern Ethiopian Rift were retrieved, Lake Chamo (c. 9 ka) and Chew Bahir (c. 45 ka). Sedimentological and palaeoecological proxies infer rapidly changing environmental conditions (wet-dry cycle) such as the African Humid Period. The fossil record in both archives is fairly rich i...

The structure and evolution of East Africa Rift Valley has made the region sensitive to climate change, with alternating wet and arid periods that may have influenced human evolution. Understanding environmental change and its impact on human societies for the last few millennia may provide insights that can be applied to longer records from the re...

1] Climate is an important control on biomass burning, but the sensitivity of fire to changes in temperature and moisture balance has not been quantified. We analyze sedimentary charcoal records to show that the changes in fire regime over the past 21,000 yrs are predictable from changes in regional climates. Analyses of paleo-fire data show that f...

East African paleoenvironments are highly variable, marked by extreme fluctuations in moisture availability, which has far-reaching implications for the origin, evolution and dispersal of Homo sapiens in and beyond the region. This paper presents results from a pilot core from the Chew Bahir basin in southern Ethiopia that records the climatic hist...

Chew Bahir, today a saline mudflat in a tectonically-bounded basin in southern Ethiopia, lies between the Main Ethiopian Rift and the Omo-Turkana basin, site of the oldest known anatomically modern human fossils. Sedimentary records from Chew Bahir can therefore provide fundamental data for reconstructing Late Quaternary environments in the source...

The Tigray Plateau of Ethiopia and Eritrea is vulnerable to environmental change, yet environmental influences on the rise and fall of the civilizations that once existed there are almost unexplored. We sampled sections of gully walls for palaeoenvironmental proxies from two sites: 1) Adi Kolen on the southern outskirts of the Plateau's most develo...

A long history of supporting sophisticated but unsustainable kingdoms makes the Tigray Plateau of the northern Ethiopian highlands a promising region for the study of relationships between palaeoenvironmental change and the trajectories of human civilizations. The natural vegetation above 2200 m elevation is thought to be forests dominated by Junip...