The large lakes drilling program for the East African Rift Lakes proposes to extract the first deep cores from lakes Malawi and Tanganyika, providing exciting new data on climate and environmental change in the East African Rift and changes in the lake basins themselves. This interdisciplinary project spans the breadth of geology, integrating evolutionary biology, geophysics, basin tectonics, climate change, geochemistry and human evolution. Major questions that will be addressed with respect to evolutionary biology and paleoecology include: aspects of timing of the diversification of the endemic radiations in the lakes, rates of diversification in ancient lakes, evolutionary escalation and predator/prey arms races, and community response to environmental change at varying time scales. We will also use the endemic faunas as tools for addressing paleoclimatic and tectonic questions, particularly with respect to the evolution of humans and other large mammals in East Africa. This project has funding pending from a variety of agencies, including the ICDP and NSF.