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Humans Implicated in Africa's Deforestation
from Nature News
Humans may have played a significant part in the sudden disappearance of rainforests from Central Africa, according to a study published online in Science. The work contradicts the prevailing view that the expansion of farming practices on the continent was made possible by the increased incidence of long, severe dry spells that destroyed vast tracts of rainforest.
Geochemist Germain Bayon and his colleagues at the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzané examined the weathering of sediment samples drawn from the mouth of the Congo River. Because deforestation would intensify weathering, the clay samples provide, in effect, a continuous record of the climate for the past 40,000 years.
When the researchers examined the sediment cores, they found that samples that were between 20,000 and 3,500 years old showed weathering that was consistent with the patterns of rainfall in the region. However, around 3,000 years ago, "there was a complete decoupling" between rainfall and the rate of weathering, Bayon says. The findings, he says, indicate that "climate could not be the only factor in explaining deforestation."
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