Relative Paleo Intensity and cyclostratigraphy as a tools to correlate the Hominin Sites Paleolakes Drilling Project Baringo core and Afar cores.

The Hominin Sites Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) is a multidisciplinary initiative that aims to understand how landscape and climate change shape human evolution in East Africa over the past 3.4 Ma. For this purpose, HSPDP has drilled long sediment cores in Kenya and Ethiopia: West Turkana, Magadi, Chew Bahir, Baringo, and Northern Awash localities. The drilled cores enabled to produce multiple high resolution environmental and climate proxy records, which can be correlated to nearby sites that are important for human evolution. The focus of this presentation are the Baringo and Northern Awash HSPDP cores with an age range for both cores from around 2.4 Ma till 3.4 Ma. This period covers the earliest stages of Homo evolution, diversification of Paranthropus and the occurrence of the earliest technological manifestations of hominins. This time range also covers the period prior to the Northern Hemisphere glaciations, the onset of glaciation, and the intensifications of the glaciation. An important starting point for proper correlation between environmental and climate proxy records with important stages in human evolution is a high-resolution age model. For the Baringo core, a high resolution age model has been published based on tephrostratigraphy and magnetostratigraphy. In this presentation, we will show new preliminary relative paleo intensity data (RPI) and cyclostratigraphy data. RPI is a tool that uses the fluctuation in intensity of the Earth's magnetic field to chronologically constrain a sedimentary sequence at high resolution. Cyclostratigraphy is based on the principle that periodic changes in insolationcaused by the variation of the Earth's precession, obliquity, and orbital eccentricity cycles are strong drivers of climate change and these can be recorded in sediments. These methods have the potential to improve the age model of the Baringo core. Furthermore, for the Afar cores no age model has been developed so far due to lack of tephras and problems with magnetostratigraphy. In this presentation we would like to present the age model current situation and show the how methods mentioned above could help build an age model for the Afar cores.