Abstract
Carbon-13 and oxygen-18 abundances were measured in large mammal skeletal remains (tooth enamel, dentine and bone) from the Chiwondo Beds in Malawi, which were dated by biostratigraphic correlation to ca. 2.5 million years ago. The biologic isotopic patterns, in particular the difference in carbon-13 abundances between grazers and browsers and the difference in oxygen-18 abundances between semi-aquatic and terrestrial herbivores, were preserved in enamel, but not in dentine and bone. The isotopic results obtained from the skeletal remains from the Chiwondo Beds indicate a dominance of savannah habitats with some trees and shrubs. This environment was more arid than the contemporaneous Ndolanya Beds in Tanzania. The present study confirms that robust australopithecines were able to live in relatively arid environments and were not confined to more mesic environments elsewhere in southern Africa.
Highlights
Links between the environment and key episodes of hominin evolution in Africa have often been suggested.[1,2,3,4,5,6] It is of prime importance to have the most accurate knowledge of the environmental conditions at the time and place that hominins were present
Carbon-13 and oxygen-18 abundances were measured in large mammal skeletal remains from the Chiwondo Beds in Malawi, which were dated by biostratigraphic correlation to ca. 2.5 million years ago
To help in refining this palaeoecological reconstruction, we present here preliminary isotopic results on mammal remains from unit 3A of the Chiwondo Beds that yielded Homo rudolfensis and Paranthropus boisei.[18,23]
Summary
Links between the environment and key episodes of hominin evolution in Africa have often been suggested.[1,2,3,4,5,6] It is of prime importance to have the most accurate knowledge of the environmental conditions at the time and place that hominins were present. Isotopic investigations of mammal remains from Plio-Pleistocene hominin sites have proved highly informative regarding palaeoecosystems in southern and eastern Africa.[7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17] To date no such investigation has been attempted in Malawi – an area that has yielded hominin fossils important for closing the gap between localities in southern and eastern Africa.[18,19,20] A recent study of the mammalian fauna indicated a palaeoecological reconstruction that was relatively arid, with a strong affinity to the Somalia-Masai ecozone, and more arid than it is today.[21] the study was made difficult by the taphonomic biases of the localities[22] leading to the preferential preservation of large species. The goal of this study is to evaluate the state of preservation of the fossil mammal material for carbonate isotopic investigations and to draw some first conclusions on the palaeoenvironment inhabited by these early hominins in south-east Africa in order to improve our knowledge about their environmental distribution and constraints
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