Geoscientists and paleoanthropologists have long speculated about the role of climate and environmental history in shaping human evolution in Africa. Bearing on this question, in recent years, drill cores of from lake beds spanning the last 3.5 million years have yielded valuable high-resolution records of climatic and ecosystem change. Eastern African Rift sediments (primarily lake beds) provide an extraordinary range of data in close proximity to important fossil hominin and archaeological sites, allowing critical study of hypotheses that connect environmental history and hominin evolution. In this talk I will review recent drill-core studies that provide evidence relevant to evaluating these paleoenvironmental conditions and evolutionary hypotheses, drawn mostly from the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project. These core records specifically span the Plio-Pleistocene boundary (3.5-2.5 million years ago, an interval of hominin diversification, including the earliest members of our genus Homo and the oldest stone tools), and the Mid-Upper Pleistocene (last million years, spanning the origin of Homo sapiens in Africa and our early technological and dispersal history). Proposed drilling of Africa’s oldest lakes promises to extend such records back to 10 million years ago, during the late Miocene.