Study tour to Cape Town

A group of 19 students and two staff members recently participated in Global Hull’s second-ever Study Tour, this year hosted by the University of Cape Town. The two-week programme focussed on the themes of social justice and global citizenship. There's more information on the background to this here. In this blog, one of our students, Daisy Williams, talks about their experience on the trip.

Our trip to Cape Town has been a once in a life time experience. I have learnt so much about the history and culture of South Africa, which I had never before taken the time to learn about. I have also learnt and grown as a person following the trip; the quality time I spent learning about different parts of South African culture stirred up a key interest in different cultures – an interest that I intend on developing further in university and beyond.

Day 0 (travel day)

The first day was a full travel day, long flights and lots of sitting around missing sleep. This was the first time we had all come together properly so meeting everyone was slightly daunting but of course everyone was friendly and conversation sparked pretty instantly. I’ve never been on long haul flights so to go from 0 to 2 in the same 24 hours… crazy! The whole flight experience was great, luckily I had an available seat next to me on both flight so I could stretch my legs slightly and get comfier (some other students weren’t so lucky). There was such a buzz between us when we landed – all eager to actually start our time in Cape Town. 

Day 1 - 5^th June

For our first trip onto the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus, we had a full tour by our lovely tour guide Takunda. He took us all around lower, middle and upper campus – yes, the campus is split into 3 sections as it’s on the side of Table Mountain – and this was the first time we got to see the amazing views of Cape Town.  

After lunch in the Baxter theatre (amazing buffet) we had our first lecture in UCT with Prof Zwelethu Jolobe. We had an introductory session to South African history, politics and culture where we learnt all about the colonisation of South Africa by the Dutch and the the British, the transportation of slaves from Eastern Asia to South Africa, the migration of different tribes within South Africa and the Apartheid. I came to Cape Town knowing very little about the country and this history class really gave us a whistle stop tour of the recent history, which would prove invaluable for the coming 2 weeks. 

Day 2 – 6^th June

The next day was a full day of South African languages and literature with Dr Tessa Dowling, which was a great session. We learnt a few phrases in Xhosa, like how to say hello – molweni! For lunch a few of us trekked up to upper campus food court for the first time, where I got a lunch wrap for about £1.50! In the afternoon, Tessa took us through some South African literature and we had the chance to write our own ‘Praise poems’, which are traditional poems passed down by families through the generations.

In the evening we all went to a local burger bar for dinner and made the most of their BOGOF burger deal. We’ve only known each other for a few days but by spending all day into the evenings together, the whole group is really bonding.

Day 3 – 7^th June 

Today we had a full day out. We first visited the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa where we had a guided tour around Mary Evans’ ‘Gilt’ exhibition; this exhibition used the silhouettes of people in different tones of brown to create different scenes. There was a nod to the slave past of Africa within her art and she has created a wallpaper which uses the layout of slave ships as the pattern. This pattern was also used in another piece where gingerbread men were laid out along the boat floor plan.

The plan was then to go up Table Mountain but due to the weather we had to rearrange this, so instead we headed to St George’s Cathedral – where Archbishop Desmond Tutu was laid to rest – and then walked through Company gardens. For lunch we went to Mojo Market which was filled with so many different cuisines and original, funky foods! After lunch we headed up Signal hill where we were greeted with views over the city before the rain clouds swept in.

In the evening, me, Elsbeth and Zoey headed to an interactive art exhibition on campus following a 3-day water conference. It was great to see people’s contributions for the topic as, during our Development and Change module, water was a big part of our learning. It was a very different experience and I thoroughly enjoyed taking part.

Day 4 – 8^th June

Today was a full day of music lecture with the incredible Professor Dizu Plaatjies who did a mixture of story telling, playing African instruments to us, and teaching us how to play! Me and Edan were the first to get up and play xylophone along side Dizu. He also shared his harrowing story about his band’s time during Apartheid; they were exiled for many years and his trauma was very visable. It has been our first time listening to the story of someone who actually experienced life during the apartheid and it was truly shocking to hear the first person stories of history we learn about on our first day.

For dinner we went to a local Chinese restaurant followed by an ice creamery and OH MY they were delicious! The perfect end to a great day.

Day 5 - 9^th June

The weather was actually sunny today, felt like the first time since we’ve been here that I didn’t need to take my raincoat everywhere! Today was dance lecture day with Lisa Wilson. In the morning we learnt about the importance of dance in South African culture and then in the afternoon we took part in a dance lesson where we learnt a range of traditional dances, such as: gun boot, Indlamu and Zulu. Everyone was so hot and sweaty after the 3 hours of dance that a couple people decided to jump in the pool back at our accommodation… they immediately regretted it, that’s for sure!

Day 6 – 10^th June

Today was (in my opinion) going to be the best day of the entire trip, and that is for one reason only – penguins. Not only was today’s itinerary jam-packed with exciting trips, BUT the weather had decided that today was going to be clear skies and glorious all day!

Our first stop was in Table mountain national park, where we stopped at a view point of the whole of Cape Town.

Then we had a pit stop at Imhoff Farm for toilet break/ grab a snack since our next opportunity for food wouldn’t be for a few more hours. Next we drove down the coast with the Atlantic Ocean to our right, where we saw some whales and drove through a town called Scarborough! Our first destination was the ostrich farm where we got the opportunity to feed ostriches. Ostrich is a common meat in South Africa, apparently it is a very healthy, lean red meat and our tour guide boasted about how delicious it is.

Nest stop was the Cape of Good Hope. This is the most southern point of the African Continent and the next bit of land from here is Antarctica! The views were incredible and up at the viewing platform you can see both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. This is also the place where ‘My Octopus Teacher’ was filmed, a documentary on Netflix.

The favourite part of my day was next… we headed to boulders beach where a colony of penguins live. There’s a walkway built above the beach and the whole area is cordoned off to protect the penguins. We stayed there about half an hour and were just watching the penguins chill out! 

We then headed to Hout bay to an indoor food market for a late lunch before doing back to our accommodation. 

Day 7 – June 11^th

Today was supposed to be our trip to Robben island but, once again, the weather made this not possible; instead we headed to a vineyard, brewery and chocolate factory to do some wine/ beer/ chocolate tasting! On our way to the vineyard we drove past the townships Langa Inganga and Kayalicha; our tour guide, Dylan, talked about the segregation and the hardship people in these communities go through.

The vineyard is called Spice Route and here we got the opportunity to do 1 tasting session of our choice. Me, Tom and Rich decided to taste the beer selection and it was so fun! Everyone was very knowledgeable and each beer came with a bucket of information about the brewing processes. The wine and chocolate tasting had very good feedback and it sounded like everyone really enjoyed their sessions. On our way to lunch we stopped outside the Victor Verster prison, where Mandela spent his final time in prison. We went to the beautiful French/ Dutch town of Franschhoek for lunch before heading for a drive through Stellenboche. 

Our evening was spend at the V&A waterfront, which is a big shopping area with lots of restaurants and bars. A few of us found somewhere to chill before meeting others and going for some food.

Day 8 – 12^th June

Morning lecture today about social justice in South Africa with Professor Helen Scanlon where we began to think about South African’s history and how past injustices can be held accountable in order to have social justice. It was a very interesting topic which a few of the criminology and sociology students found extremely interesting for their own studies back in Hull. 

In the afternoon we visited the District 6 museum followed by a walking tour to the District 6 area; here we saw first hand the segregation inflicted during the apartheid, as the black and mixed race community that lived here were all relocated and the area bulldozed to make way for a residential area for white people. Due to other political issues, this rebuild never happened and district 6 is now just a waste land with only memories left of life before. 

We then went to the slave lodge museum which is based in a historical building where slaves were kept and housed. This experience was very hard-hitting and raw.

Day 9 – 13^th June

Today we continued with our social injustice lecture before heading out to the Castle of Goodhope for the afternoon. We had lunch here, where we tried the South African dish of Bobottie; it was delicious! We then toured round the castle led by Prof. Helen Scanlon, who showed us a few different installations she has helped put up about social injustice. After this we headed to the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation and further learnt about their lives and legacy. It was a beautiful memorial filled with inspiration.

Day 10 – 14^th June

We concluded the social injustice lecture today by talking about some cases Prof. Helen Scanlon has been a part of. For lunch we then travelled to Bokaap district to have traditional Cape Malay cuisine cooked by the brilliant Fayrusa. It was all delicious and we ate right there in her home! After lunch we had a walking tour around the colourful district where we learnt about the heritage and ansterors of the area. 

To finish the day a group of us booked an astroturf football pitch and had a kick around for an hour with our tour guide Takunda. It was a such a fun evening – everyone enjoyed it, whether they were running around the pitch or cheering on from the sidelines. 

Day 11 – 15^th June 

We had our final full lecture day today on global citizenship where we talked about our roles are global citizens and the challenges we face. Our lecture room had no windows so it was a relief to get out into the fresh air at the end of the day! In the evening we decided to have a final group meal as there are plans already for tomorrow. We tried out a local steak house and WOW it was delicious. It was load-shedding whilst we were there so half way through the lights came back on and music started playing which felt very random as we had gotten used to the ambience. But it was a great meal and great company too.

Day 12 – 16^th June

Today was bittersweet. Can’t believe it was our final full day in Cape Town. We tried Robben Island one last time this morning but unfortunately the wind wasn’t on our side, so back to the lecture room it was. After our final global citizenship lecture we headed to the Eastern Asia food market – a market selling traditional Asian cuisine. The Gyro and ice-cream I got from here may have been the best meal from the entire trip!

Then we headed to Table Mountain, where we finally got to go up the cable car to the top. There was 0% visibility from the top but it didn’t matter, we explored the top and got absolutely drenched in the clouds. It was great.

For dinner, UCT global team were kindly taking us out to a restaurant called Gold. What I hadn’t realised before we got there was that we were getting a 12 course tasting menu alongside interactive music, dance and face painting! The whole night was so fun and a perfect end to the entire trip. THANK YOU UCT!!!!

Making waves and moving sediment

Dr Hannah Williams has been a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Physical Geography at the University of Hull since April 2017. Hannah is part of the Hydralab+ project, a large European project that brings together researchers to improve experimental hydraulic research to better address climate change adaptation issues. Here she talks about a recent set of experiments carried out at the Total Environment Simulator.

Mixed Sediment Beaches are commonly found at high latitudes around the world, including amongst other locations, along the coastline of the United Kingdom. These types of beaches can consist of a mixture of both sands and gravels, and behave differently under hydrodynamic forcing, such as waves, to those made up of a single sediment size. Although some research, mainly in the 1970s-1980s, has been carried out to gain an understanding of the morphological behaviour of these types of beaches, little is still known about the variations in the morphology of these beaches due to mixed sediment, and how they respond to the hydrodynamic conditions.  The aim of this study was to try and gain some insights into beach response using a physical model.

At the University of Hull, we are lucky that we have a large experimental flume available for research called the Total Environment Simulator (TES). The TES has a working area of 11m by 6m, and is equipped with pumps to allow recirculating flow and sediment, a multi-paddle wave generator for the generation of both regular and irregular waves up to ~0.3m in height (depending on water depth), and finally is equipped with a rainfall generator sprinkler system on the roof. During my time at the University of Hull, I have been involved in experiments using all of these systems, demonstrating just how versatile the flume is. The photo below shows the TES when it first opened in 2000. As a well-used facility, it doesn’t look quite so clean anymore!  

For these particular experiments we were only interested in the beach response under wave loading, so only the wave generator system was required. We constructed a large beach across the opposite end of flume, with a height of 0.8m at the rear, and extending 5m towards the wave paddles. This gave the beach an initial gradient of 1:7.5.To obtain a mixed beach, we chose two different sediment sizes with a large difference in diameter. The fine sediment had a D₅₀=215μm (often known as play sand as it is commonly used in children’s sand pits), whilst the coarser sediment had a D₅₀=1.6mm. To construct this beach, this required over 5 tonnes of each type of sediment (and this including bulking out some of the area deep underneath the beach with breeze blocks), which all had to be lifted into the flume and distributed by hand. The photo below shows the initial smooth beach conditions. 

In terms of measurements, there were two main parameters we were interested in, firstly the incoming wave conditions. To measure these, we had 8 acoustic wave gauges distributed throughout the flume (see below). These recorded information about the wave heights and periods, from which we can gain an understanding of the transformation of the waves as they approach the beach. 

The second parameter we were interested in was the beach morphology. To measure this, we deployed a Terrestrial Laser Scanner. This was mounted from the ceiling above the beach. After each experimental run, the water was drained from the flume, and the scanner carried out a full 360 degree scan of the beach surface.The image below shows an example of a TLS scan, in which you can clearly identify the top of the swash zone, as well as a berm which has formed part way down the beach, and ripples in the lower section. 

For the actual experiments carried out here, we attempted to replicate some of the influence of the tidal cycle on the response of the beach. The experiments were run at three different water depths, namely 0.3m, 0.4m and 0.5m. In three of the experiments, we hit the beach with an initial storm (H=0.18m, T=2.2s, where H is wave height and T is wave period), at different points in the tidal cycle. One at high tide, then one at mid-tide on the flood tide, and one at mid-tide on the ebb tide. The purpose of this was to try and investigate the effect that timing of the storm with relation to the tidal cycle has on the beach response. After each storm a number of recovery events (H=0.10m, T=1.5s) were carried out, at each depth to complete a tidal cycle. The video below shows some of the experiments in action.

Using the laser scans, we can also examine the differences between scans, giving us an idea of the evolution of the beach throughout the experiments. From these we can obtain information about the amount of erosion and accretion at different points of the beach, and examine if this is different depending on when the storm occurred. The image below shows an example of a Digital Elevation Model of Difference, from which a number of interesting observations can be made.  It should be noted that Red shows accretion of sediment, whilst blue shows erosion of sediment. 

The very top of the beach remains white, this shows that the beach level here remains constant throughout the experiments, due to the wave run-up not reaching this point. Just below this section is a large area of erosion, this is the swash zone, where waves are breaking. This is a very energetic area which results in a large amount of sediment transport, mainly transported further down the beach to the zone showing large accretion. This is known as a berm and often forms as the wave deposits sediment. Below this area, it can be seen that ripples form. This is prior to the wave breaking where sediment movement occurs in an elliptical motion, forming small ripples on the surface. These are all features that are not unique to mixed sediment beaches, however, one feature that is, are the beach cusps. These can be identified in the figure by the regular arc shapes present. There is limited information on the origin of beach cusps, but once they have been created they are a self-sustaining formation. This is because as a wave hits the area of the beach with the cusp, it splits at the point and the water is forced either side. As the wave then breaks, the coarser sediment falls out of suspension and is deposited on these points (known as horns), whilst the water flows into the arc (also known as an embayment) where it in turn erodes out the finer sediment.

These experiments have only just finished, so analysis of the results is still on-going, but hopefully we will have gained some useful insights into the behaviour of mixed sediment beaches which can be used to help devise beach management plans in the future.

For more information on the work of the Hydralab+ project, then please visit: https://hydralab.eu/ 

Hull’s Protest Stickers

Dr Hannah Awcock has been a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Hill since January 2019. Hannah is interested in the cultural and historical geographies of resistance. Here she uses protest stickers to investigate Hull’s radical culture.

Stickers of all kinds are a common sight on the streets of towns and cities across the world. Stuck to lampposts, bins, utility boxes and other street furniture, most people probably don’t give them a second glance. Stickers on the street are temporary; some are gone in days, removed by people who didn’t like them or who picked them off when they got bored waiting for a bus. Others take months or even years to disappear, gradually erased by the weather or covered up by more stickers. Stickers come in a huge range of shapes, sizes, and designs: some are handmade whilst others are printed; some are only text, others use a combination of text and images; some are black-and-white, but most use colour. They are used for a range of purposes, including advertising and street art. Sometimes their purpose isn’t clear. I am interested in stickers that make a political statement; I call them protest stickers. Activists and campaigners use protest stickers as a way of claiming space and publicising their message. They can tell us a lot about how activists and protesters engage with public space.

Protest stickers like the one above are small stickers that covey a political message. They can be found in public spaces all over the world. Protest stickers can reveal a lot about the city they are in; they can tell you a lot about the local radical culture. Whenever I go somewhere new for the first time, I photograph the protest stickers I find. When I moved to Hull in December 2018, I was curious to get to know the city and see which protest stickers I would find. What I discovered is a wide range of protest stickers on a range of topics, as the selection featured below demonstrates.

 Anti-fascism is one of the most common topics of protest stickers—there is a strong tradition of ‘stickering’ amongst anti-fascist groups. There is also a strong association between anti-fascism and music, as this sticker suggests.

Whilst a lot of protest stickers relate to specific issues, some are quite general. This sticker is emphasising the importance of solidarity, one of the core concepts of activism of all kinds. Solidarity is the practice of offering practical, financial, and moral support to other activist groups and campaigns. The white ‘A’ in a circle is a symbol of anarchism.

Since the EU Referendum in June 2016, Brexit has been a popular subject of protest stickers, produced by both Leavers and Remainers. This sticker is produced by the EU Flag Mafia, which sells a wide range of anti-Brexit merchandise (you can by 100 stickers for £6 if you are interested, and they have several different designs).

This is one of the most unusual sticker topics I have ever found, and I have never found this sticker anywhere else but Hull. Biafra was a secessionist state in eastern Nigeria between May 1967 and January 1970. Biafra’s attempt to become an independent state sparked the Nigerian Civil War. The Nigerian military government effectively starved the people of Biafra into submission, and they surrendered. Some groups still continue to campaign for Biafran independence, and I would love to know what the connection is between these campaigns and Hull!

This is an example of a handmade sticker. It is playing on the double meaning of ‘colour,’ referring to both race and the more literal interpretation, as in red, blue, yellow, etc.

 

This sticker was produced by the Anti-fascist Network, but it is also promoting an anti-racist message. Three slanted arrows in a circle is a common symbol used by anti-fascist groups. It shows how protest stickers can be territorial, by claiming the surrounding area as an anti-fascist space.

This sticker demonstrates what can happen when stickers are not removed quickly. It has been partially peeled off, and large parts of the rest have faded away. I have seen this sticker before, so I know what it says. It reads “Fight War not Wars,” which is derived from the popular 1960s anti-war slogan “Make Love not War.”

This is another sticker that I have never seen anywhere else but in Hull. Protest stickers promoting vegetarianism and veganism are relatively common however. This sticker is encouraging the viewer to watch Earthlings, a 2005 documentary about how humanity uses animals in a variety of ways. Its design is simple and there is quite a lot of text. On way of analysing stickers is to think about how effective their design is. For example, which of the stickers in this post do you think is most likely to make you stop and read it if you saw it in the street? Why is this?

Most protest stickers are left-wing and/or progressive. Sometimes, however, I come across a particularly unpleasant sticker like this one. It is accusing all refugees of being prone to violence against women. In recent years, women’s rights have increasingly been used as an excuse for anti-immigrant sentiment, which could be related to the rising number of women in right-wing groups. The sticker was produced by Combat 18, a violent neo-Nazi terrorist group formed in the UK in 1992.

This isn’t strictly speaking a protest sticker, but I wanted to end on a positive note! Jean Bishop is a local hero in Hull, having raised almost £120,000 for Age UK over the last two decades armed only with a collection tin and a bee costume. She has been an inspiration to the city for some time, and in 2017 was awarded and British Empire Medal for her efforts.

In this post, I have attempted to show the wide variety of protest stickers that can be found on the streets of Hull. Perhaps next time you are out and about in the city, you will start to notice them too!

If you would like to see more of the protest stickers I have found on my travels, you can view them on my blog: https://turbulentlondon.com/category/protest-stickers/

Visitors at an Exhibition

Dr Ruth Slatter has been a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Hull since January 2018. Ruth is interested in how individuals experienced institutional spaces during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Here she talks about her recent trip to Chicago’s Newberry Library and her research into nineteenth-century international exhibitions.

Historical geographers, historians and design historians have long been interested in international exhibitions. These discussions often beginning in 1851, the year Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert triumphantly opened the Great Exhibition in London. Famous for its glass, greenhouse-like temporary building, which became known as the Crystal Palace, the exhibition displayed industrial, designed and natural products from across the world. During the rest of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries this exhibition set a precedent which was replicated across Europe, America and Australia.

 J. McNeven, The transept from the Grand Entrance, Souvenir of the Great Exhibition 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

Bringing together representatives from each of the represented nations, these exhibitions were – what we would now refer to as – megaevents and played an important role within the colonial politics of the nineteenth-century western world. Like today’s Olympic Games, World Cups, or Cities of Culture designations, these events were an opportunity for cities to be shown off to an international audience; for countries to demonstrate their wealth, cultural capital and political influence; and for competing nations and empires to gain an international reputation for innovative design, beautiful craft, or even rich natural resources.

Sèvres porcelain, displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition as part of the French display 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

Sir George Gilbert Scott, The Hereford Screen, displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

However, these exhibitions also created the opportunity for all members of western societies – from Lords and Ladies to pit men and match stick girls – to see the world in their back yard. Therefore, my research into these events combines traditional discussions about their political purposes, with consideration of how visitors experienced them. My research has largely focused on London’s 1862 International Exhibition – the rather poor and under considered relative of the earlier 1851 Great Exhibition. Working with Helen Creswell, curator and design writer, I have been exploring peoples’ sensory experiences of these events, asking questions about the extent to which visitors engaged with their underlying political purposes and considering them as part of the urban spaces in which they were located.

Edmund Walker, Exterior of the International Exhibition of 1862 

© Victoria and Albert Museum

In November 2018 I was invited to speak at the Newberry Library in Chicago about this research. They had organised an exhibition about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (the American term for an International Exhibition) using their extensive collection of related material and organised a set of related public events. 

In this talk I explored a number of different ways in which we can discuss visitors’ experiences of these events. Considering the designs, the ground plans and the guidebooks made for these events, I spoke about the scale of these buildings, how they were confusing to navigate and therefore left visitors feeling exhausted and bemused. Engaging with commentaries written about these events in contemporary newspapers and magazines, I reflected on the many sounds that would have been heard in these spaces: the clatter of working machines, the tinkle of piano keeps, the chime of porcelain cups in the tea room. With reference to images of these spaces published at the time, I emphasised the importance of thinking about what visitors’ touched while in these spaces, how their bodies were often pressed together during busy periods and how they would also have brushed up against exhibits in often cluttered exhibition spaces. And, positioning these exhibitions within their urban contexts, I discussed how visitors’ experiences of these spaces were not only informed by what they saw, heart or felt in these spaces, but also their experiences of the (generally crowded) public transport and roads they used to arrive and depart from these events, the hotels and hostels they stayed in, and the character of the city in which these exhibitions were located.

My whole public talk is available here: https://soundcloud.com/newberrylibrary/eye-of-the-beholder-visitor-experience-at-19th-century-world-fairs

And you can also listen to a podcast I recorded for the Newberry Library, going into a bit more detail about the 1862 International Exhibition in particular here: https://soundcloud.com/newberrylibrary/the-1862-intl-exhibition-revisited

Climate, dispersal, civilisation and collapse

Dr Jonathan Dean has been a Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Hull since February 2017. Here he draws on work carried out with the British Geological Survey to investigate the links between climate and humans.

Why did some Homo sapiens, after evolving in eastern Africa and living there for tens of thousands of years, decide it was time to up sticks and move to Asia? Why did cities and vast empires in the Middle East collapse suddenly around 4,000 years ago, and again 3,000 years ago? People have often proposed a link between climate change and the course of human history, but to test these theories we need to know exactly how the climate changed back through time. That’s where people like me come in. My job is to work out how climate changed in the past. Because there are no meteorological records going back more than a few hundred years, we have to come up with clever ways to reconstruct past climate. I use lakes as a historical rain gauge. In some lakes, carbonate – which is like the limescale in your kettle at home – forms every year in the surface waters. In this carbonate, there are different types of oxygen, and the ratio of one type of oxygen to another varies depending on factors such as how deep or shallow the lake was at the time it formed. This carbonate then falls through the water to the lake bed and is locked away as an archive of lake level change…until scientists come along. We drill into the sediments to take cores. We then analyse the ratio of one type of oxygen to another at different points back through time from the carbonates in these sediments, and from that can reconstruct changes in lake level, and hence climate changes between wet and dry, back through time.

Lake sediments about to be analysed in the lab.

Let’s consider two examples of how climate change might have changed the course of human history. Firstly, why did our species, Homo sapiens, leave Africa after evolving there? Scientists have found evidence of Homo sapiens in the Middle East as far back as 130,000 years ago. However, other researchers have analysed the DNA of modern humans and concluded that modern non-Africans are likely to be descended from people who left Africa via Egypt around 60,000 years ago, suggesting the people who left 130,000 years ago died out before they could successfully populate the rest of the world. But why did Homo sapiens leave Africa? Maybe climate change played a role. We have used sediments taken from an old lake on the border between Ethiopia and Kenya. We showed in a paper published last year that there was a climate shift in eastern Africa at the time the successful dispersals out of Africa occurred around 60,000 years ago – the climate was changing from being very variable with multiple fluctuations between wetter and drier conditions, to a more stable climate where there was less change. During the more variable times, it was difficult for Homo sapiens, and only those who adapted to each climate change survived. This led to natural selection for the most flexible, highly skilled individuals and populations. When the climate then became more stable, it was easier for Homo sapiens to survive so populations increased. This led to pressure, as more and more humans tried to survive on the food and water resources of eastern Africa. This may have therefore pushed some people out of the region in order to try to find new lands to live on, and because of the natural selection during the times of variable climate they had the skills required to migrate out of Africa.

A dry lake bed in Ethiopia that we drilled to retrieve sediment cores (Photo Julian Ruddock).

Our second example brings us much closer to the present day. Between the time of the migration out of Africa and 5,000 years ago, humans had started playing musical instruments, developed farming and invented the wheel. But at approximately 4,000 years ago and again at 3,000 years ago it seems big civilisations ‘collapsed’ – the archaeological evidence suggests they either went into decline or ceased to exist all together. Again, climate change has been used to help account for these sudden events. A drought lasting several hundred years has been identified ~4,000 years ago in climate records from lakes in the Middle East – for example in our record from a Turkish lake that was published in a paper in 2015. In Egypt, the Nile floods failed, leading to famine and political upheaval, and they even stopped building pyramids for a few hundred years. Around 3,000 years ago we identify another drought, at the time the Hittites, who lived in central Turkey, went into decline. Nowadays in central Turkey, there is only roughly 300 mm of precipitation a year and even with modern technology agriculture is difficult. But at the times of these ‘collapses’ we have shown it would have been even drier. These droughts may have weakened civilisations and combined with civil conflict, invasions and population pressures to cause the ‘collapses’. We will never know for sure what killed off these civilisations, but what we can say is that it would have become much more difficult to grow crops, and hence for people to feed themselves, during these droughts.

Therefore, climate seems to have been a major force in shaping the course of human history – from explaining the migration of early Homo sapiens out of Africa, to contributing to the collapse of civilisations. There are important lessons for the future here. The Middle East is likely to bear the brunt of climate change this century, with drier conditions due to falling precipitation and increased summer evaporation. Eastern African is predicted to see some large climate changes too. Already politically volatile regions, fighting over water resources is likely to intensify conflicts this century. In the Middle East, it may become as dry as it was at the times of the droughts 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, and the question is whether modern technology and politics will prevent the ‘collapses’ of civilisations that we saw in the past.

(A version of this blog was first published on the BGS Geoblogy.)