TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lüdecke, Tina
A1  - Kullmer, Ottmar
A1  - Wacker, Ulrike
A1  - Sandrock, Oliver
A1  - Fiebig, Jens
A1  - Schrenk, Friedemann
A1  - Mulch, Andreas
T1  - Dietary versatility of Early Pleistocene hominins
T2  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
N2  - New geochemical data from the Malawi Rift (Chiwondo Beds, Karonga Basin) fill a major spatial gap in our knowledge of hominin adaptations on a continental scale. Oxygen (δ18O), carbon (δ13C), and clumped (Δ47) isotope data on paleosols, hominins, and selected fauna elucidate an unexpected diversity in the Pleistocene hominin diet in the various habitats of the East African Rift System (EARS). Food sources of early Homo and Paranthropus thriving in relatively cool and wet wooded savanna ecosystems along the western shore of paleolake Malawi contained a large fraction of C3 plant material. Complementary water consumption reconstructions suggest that ca. 2.4 Ma, early Homo (Homo rudolfensis) and Paranthropus (Paranthropus boisei) remained rather stationary near freshwater sources along the lake margins. Time-equivalent Paranthropus aethiopicus from the Eastern Rift further north in the EARS consumed a higher fraction of C4 resources, an adaptation that grew more pronounced with increasing openness of the savanna setting after 2 Ma, while Homo maintained a high versatility. However, southern African Paranthropus robustus had, similar to the Malawi Rift individuals, C3-dominated feeding strategies throughout the Early Pleistocene. Collectively, the stable isotope and faunal data presented here document that early Homo and Paranthropus were dietary opportunists and able to cope with a wide range of paleohabitats, which clearly demonstrates their high behavioral flexibility in the African Early Pleistocene.
KW  - hominin adaptation
KW  - paleoecology
KW  - paleodiet
KW  - clumped isotopes
KW  - Malawi Rift
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50679
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-506793
SN  - 1091-6490
SN  - 0027-8424
N1  - Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
VL  - 115
IS  - 52
SP  - 13330
EP  - 13335
PB  - National Acad. of Sciences
CY  - Washington, DC
ER  -