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paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

paleoenvironment

  • What the cat didn't drag away

    Thu, 2012-05-03 17:50 -- John Hawks

    Digging through some literature this afternoon, I ran into a 2007 paper by Denise Su and Terry Harrison [1], who mounted several explanations for why Laetoli, Tanzania, has a relatively low abundance of Au. afarensis fossils compared to other sites. They suggest a size-sorting bias due to predation, which would disproportionately have affected postcranial bones:

    The evidence supports the inference that, with increasing body size of the prey species, there is a greater chance that skeletal elements will survive complete destruction by carnivore scavenging. This results in a higher representation of postcranial elements relative to craniodental remains as body size increases. However, the converse means that species in the lower weight categories are increasingly susceptible to being entirely destroyed by carnivores. Hominins, which occur in the lowest end of the range for WC II, would be among those large mammals expected to be most heavily affected by the greatest number of species with the ability to completely remove skeletal elements from the skeletal assemblage at Laetoli. If this model is correct, then it is not unexpected that so few postcranial bones of hominins have been recovered. In fact, it is precisely what would be predicted at an open-air site with subaerial deposition in which the skeletal assemblage was readily accessible to carnivore scavengers.

    They also point to the variation in the abundance of living chimpanzees and other primates in different ecologies.

    Extant chimpanzees occur at a wide range of population densities across equatorial Africa according to habitat. Densities range from 0.08–0.09/km2 in open woodland (Ugalla, Tanzania; Mount Assirik, Senegal) to 3.1–4.7/km2 in closed woodland and forest (Gombe, Tanzania) (Plumptre and Cox, 2006), an almost sixty-fold difference between marginal and optimal habitats. This observation gives us a better appreciation of how different types of habitat can influence the biomass of African hominoids. It can be assumed that similar levels of population-density variation would have characterized A. afarensis across its geographic range. Given this fact, if A. afarensis at Hadar is indeed more common than at Laetoli, then it would suggest that Hadar had habitats that were more optimal for sustaining higher population densities of A. afarensis compared to Laetoli. The magnitude of the difference between the specimen counts between Hadar and Laetoli are equivalent to the difference in population density between modern-day chimpanzees living in closed and open woodland habitats, respectively.

    Based on the fauna -- which interestingly include some rat genera now absent in East Africa but present in India and Southeast Asia -- along with other indicators, they infer that Hadar had more woody cover than Laetoli during the period represented by the hominins.

    References

    1. Su D, Harrison T. Ecological implications of the relative rarity of fossil hominins at Laetoli. Journal of Human Evolution. 2008;55(4):672 - 681.
    Tags: 
    paleoenvironment
    Laetoli
    Hadar
    fauna

  • Carnivores and early Homo

    Tue, 2012-04-24 10:27 -- John Hawks

    Ann Gibbons reports on a recent conference investigating the interaction of climate change and Plio-Pleistocene human evolution "Where's the beef? Early humans took it." I like her description of Lars Werdelin's work:

    After comparing fossils of 78 species of carnivores that lived during five different periods of time between 3.5 million years ago (when large carnivores were at their peak) and 1.5 million years ago, Werdelin found that all but six of 29 species of large carnivores (animals that weighed more than 21.5 kilos) had gone extinct in that time. Moreover, the mass extinction began just before H. erectus appeared in the fossil record 1.9 million years ago. He also found that the community of carnivores alive 2.5 million to 2 million years ago ate a much broader range of food—with species within a community filling a wider range of dietary niches. By 1.5 million years ago, just hypercarnivores that ate only meat, such as lions and leopards, had survived while omnivores that scavenged and ate a wider range of foods, like civets, had disappeared. "Even I was surprised by the dramatic drop," Werdelin says.

    It will be interesting to see more details of this work as it is published. The picture described here seems fairly different from Werdelin's 2005 paper with Margaret Lewis [1], in which they concluded there was no evidence of a turnover pulse of carnivore species between 3 million and 2 million years ago. In that paper, they did note that the present carnivore community is dominated by species that have no Pliocene record in Africa. It's not clear how much of this turnover resulted from dispersals of carnivores into Africa from Eurasia, and how much was in situ origins of new genera. That paper was focused on the role of herbivore species turnover on the carnivore community, showing that the two records do not match each other.

    With the present focus on hominins as potential competitors, maybe the expansion in scope to a greater number of omnivores made the difference to the analysis. On the other hand, it's hard to see how recent carnivores can be purer meat-eaters than extinct sabretooths like Megantereon. Lewis and Werdelin's 2007 book chapter [2] (in a Springer volume with no access for me, naturally) does link the origin of Homo erectus 1.8 million years ago to carnivore turnover.

    While the appearance of stone tools at 2.6 Ma has no apparent effect upon carnivorans, the appearance of Homo ergaster after 1.8 Ma may have been at least partly responsible for the decrease in the carnivoran origination rate and the increase in the extinction rate at this time. The behavior of H. ergaster, climate change, and concomitant changes in prey species richness may have caused carnivoran species richness to drop precipitously after 1.5 Ma. In this situation, even effective kleptoparasitism by H. ergaster may have been enough to drive local populations of carnivorans that overlapped with hominins in dietary resources to extinction. Possibly as a result, the modern guild, which evolved within the last few hundred thousand years, is composed primarily of generalists.

    We should probably add to the picture the evidence for dispersal into and out of Africa, which is unclear at the moment for carnivores [3]. If humans had an important effect on the carnivore guild, we should expect codispersal of some carnivore genera with humans in the Early Pleistocene. It's possible that such codispersal did occur into Eurasia, but first appearance dates are not the greatest evidence to build such a hypothesis.

    On that note, there are some incredible carnivore materials from Malapa that may really add to the picture of carnivore-hominin relations. The first of these were published last fall by Brian Kuhn and colleagues, including Werdelin [4]. It will be exciting to see more of this work come out, as I'm sure that the preservation of a wide array of carnivore materials is really shifting how we can think about the relative diets and ecological roles of these species. It's another case where paleontologists can now leverage the vast record of time covered in East Africa by applying the detailed information from the exceptionally preserved Malapa deposit.

    UPDATE (2012-04-25): Adam Van Arsdale writes that Dmanisi provides even more evidence about carnivore-human interactions: "Early Homo and the carnivore guild".

    The Dmanisi fauna in general, including the carnivores, are only just beginning to be more widely published. A 2011 paper by Hemmer and colleagues discusses a possible large cheetah-like carnivore found at the site. This 2010 paper by Sotnikova and Rook looks at Canid evolution in Eurasia more broadly, but discusses the abundant Canid material from Dmanisi in some depth.

    Kate Wong gives some more information about Werdelin's presentation: "Rise of Humans 2 Million Years Ago Doomed Large Carnivores".

    References

    1. Werdelin L, Lewis ME. Plio-Pleistocene Carnivora of eastern Africa: species richness and turnover patterns. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 2005;144(2):121 - 144.
    2. Lewis ME, Werdelin L. Patterns of Change in the Plio-Pleistocene Carnivorans of Eastern Africa: Implications for Hominin Evolution. In: Bobe R, Alemseged Z, Behrensmeyer AK Hominin Environments in the East African Pliocene: An Assessment of the Faunal Evidence. Hominin Environments in the East African Pliocene: An Assessment of the Faunal Evidence. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2007. pp. 77 - 105.
    3. O'Regan HJ, Turner A, Bishop LC, Elton S, Lamb AL. Hominins without fellow travellers? First appearances and inferred dispersals of Afro-Eurasian large-mammals in the Plio-Pleistocene. Quaternary Science Reviews. 2011;30(11-12):1343 - 1352.
    4. Kuhn BF, Werdelin L, Hartstone-Rose A, Lacruz RS, Berger LR. Carnivoran remains from the Malapa hominin site, South Africa. PloS one. 2011;6(11):e26940.
    Tags: 
    carnivores
    Homo
    Pliocene
    Pleistocene
    paleoenvironment
    dispersal
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.