The “4.2ka event” is frequently described as a major global climate anomaly between 4.2 and 3.9ka, which defines the beginning of the current Meghalayan age in the Holocene epoch. The “event” has been disproportionately reported from proxy records from the Northern Hemisphere, but its climatic manifestation remains much less clear in the Southern Hemisphere. Here, we present highly resolved and chronologically well-constrained speleothem oxygen and carbon isotopes records between ～6 and 3ka from Rodrigues Island in the southwestern subtropical Indian Ocean, located ～600km east of Mauritius. Our records show that the 4.2ka event did not manifest itself as a period of major climate change at Rodrigues Island in the context of our record's length. Instead, we find evidence for a multi-centennial drought that occurred near-continuously between 3.9 and 3.5ka and temporally coincided with climate change throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
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