Mean body size estimation in large mammals and the computation of biomass in past ecosystems: An application to the Pleistocene sites of Orce and Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain)

Guillermo Rodríguez-Gómez,José María Bermúdez De Castro,Undefined Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro,Jesús A Martín-González,Undefined Paul Palmqvist

doi:10.5852/cr-palevol2022v21a10

Abstract

Estimates of adult body mass are usually considered as equivalent of mean population body size in most studies of ancient mammals. However, given that any population is composed in part of subadult individuals, this approach overestimates the mean population body mass and biomass. For this reason, more realistic estimates of mean population body mass should be used. In this paper, we: 1) test five different proxies of population mean mass; and 2) estimate the total prey biomass in the paleoecosystems from the Orce and Atapuerca sites as an approach for estimating their carrying capacity. Our results for past ecosystems support the use of survival profiles derived from the Weibull model (SPW), as they show values in better agreement with those of extant populations. They also estimate higher carrying capacities for the faunal assemblages of Orce than for those of Atapuerca. We suggest that the environmental conditions of Orce could have played an important role in the first peopling of Europe.

Highlights

Two archaeo-paleontological sites, Barranco León (BL) and Fuente Nueva-3 (FN-3), preserve skeletal remains of 18 species of large mammals associated with Oldowan (i.e., Mode 1) lithic tools and the bones of large mammals unearthed in them document cut marks and percussion marks (Barsky et al 2010, 2016; Espigares et al 2013, 2019; Toro-Moyano et al 2013)
The second column provides the median value for the adult individuals of the species analyzed in this study, the third lists the values of adult female body mass, and the fifth shows
Our results suggest that mean population body mass can be estimated as 79% of adult body mass (LT is 21% lower than Adult body mass (ABM) on average), but it should be considered that there were differences among the species and that our sample should be wider to extract a similar conclusion (Table 4)

Summary

Introduction

The concept of carrying capacity is complex, it is widely used in life sciences (Sayre 2008). The study of the Orce sites has contributed insightful inferences on a number of autecological and synecological aspects of the species of large mammals of Southern Europe during the Early Pleistocene and their paleocommunities (e.g. Martínez-Navarro & Palmqvist 1995, 1996; Turner & Antón 1996; Arribas & Palmqvist 1998, 1999; Palmqvist et al 1999, 2002, 2003, 2008a, b, 2011; Espigares et al 2013, 2019; García-Aguilar et al 2014a, 2015). These sites have been employed to model the ecological conditions before and after the first human arrival in Western Europe during the late Early Pleistocene (Rodríguez-Gómez et al 2016a, 2017a)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion