From these cores and from records from Lakes Tanganyika (East Africa) and Bosumtwi (West Africa), we document a major rise in water levels and a shift to more humid conditions over much of tropical Africa after ≈70 kyr ago. Surprisingly, these intervals of pronounced tropical African aridity in the early late-Pleistocene were much more severe than the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the period previously recognized as one of the most arid of the Quaternary. Our record shows periods of severe aridity between 135 and 75 thousand years (kyr) ago, when the lake's water volume was reduced by at least 95%. Here we present results from new scientific drill cores from Lake Malawi, the first long and continuous, high-fidelity records of tropical climate change from the continent itself. The environmental backdrop to the evolution and spread of early Homo sapiens in East Africa is known mainly from isolated outcrops and distant marine sediment cores.
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