40Ar/39Ar eruption ages of Turkana Basin tuffs: millennial scale resolution constrains paleoclimate proxy tuning models and hominin fossil ages

Abstract

The Turkana Basin in Kenya/Ethiopia hosts remarkable fossil-rich sediments that are central to our understanding of early hominin evolution, with interbedded volcanic tuffs providing critical time markers. However, the resolution of existing Early Pleistocene/Pliocene ages is limited to ∼20-60 kyr, inhibiting evaluation of climatic/environmental drivers of evolution. Here, we present high precision, single-feldspar 40Ar/39Ar age and elemental data for four stratigraphically significant tuffs. These samples exhibit variably dispersed age distributions correlated with feldspar compositional trends, interpreted to indicate partial retention of inherited argon, related to crustal ‘cold storage’ ..