Location: Online, no registration required
Cost: Free

The coastal forests of eastern Africa constitute a biodiversity hotspot, and may have played a central role in hominin origins. But the evolutionary history of this biogeographic realm remains poorly known because of a sparse fossil record. Here we present the first paleontological evidence of eastern Africa’s coastal forests and aim to answer the question: what role did these forests play in generating Africa’s biodiversity including the origin of our own clade, the Hominini? Our team has discovered a series of new fossil sites in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique, which shed new light on African evolution during the Miocene epoch. The emerging fossil record from Gorongosa includes new mammalian species and a rich record of fossil plants. The evidence suggests that the relative isolation of the eastern regions acted as an engine of evolutionary change for millions of years.

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About the speaker

René Bobe is a paleobiologist and evolutionary anthropologist interested in the relationship between climate and evolution, with a focus on the environments and ecology of human origins in Africa. He is the 2025 Leakey Foundation Gordon P. Getty Award Laureate. Dr. Bobe studies fossil mammals that provide long-term records of ecological change and uses interdisciplinary approaches to analyse how the past can help us understand current environmental problems. He has conducted field research at key paleoanthropological sites in eastern Africa, such as Hadar, Dikika, the lower Omo Valley, and the Turkana Basin, and for the past decade at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. He also carries out field research in western Patagonia focused on early South American monkeys. Currently, he is a researcher at the University of Algarve, Portugal, and Head Paleontologist at Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique.