The expansion of grassland ecosystems in Africa in relation to mammalian evolution and the origin of the genus Homo

Bobe, René

doi:10.1016/s0031-0182(04)00049-5

Cited by 75 publications

(43 citation statements)

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“…In Member B to lower Member G fluvial deposition predominated, and isolated teeth are frequently preserved. When examined by member, the relative frequencies of isolated teeth and analysis of other skeletal parts suggests that the Shungura Formation is essentially isotaphonomic, that is to say, the taphonomic biases remained uniform over time (Bobe and Eck, 2001, Bobe et al, 2002, Bobe and Leakey, 2009, Bobe and Behrensmeyer, 2004. Moreover, no significant association was found between the taxonomic and taphonomic data sets, lending further support to the idea that the two signals are independent of each other (Bobe et al, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Studying the ecomorphology of Shungura bovids provides an alternative means of evaluating previous paleoenvironmental research, and it has the potential to add new insights derived from abundance-based criteria. Specifically, the following paleoenvironmental inferences suggested by previous research (e.g., Bobe and Eck, 2001;Bobe et al, 2002;Alemseged, 2003;Bobe and Behrensmeyer, 2004;Bobe, 2006;Bobe et al, 2007;Bobe and Leakey, 2009;Bobe, 2011;Levin et al, 2011) can be investigated here:…”

Section: Ecomorphology and Shungura Paleoenvironmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There was also an increase in open grassland-indicating taxa, although these still comprised less than 15% of the macromammalian faunal sample, suggesting that environmental heterogeneity remained pronounced (Bobe and Behrensmeyer, 2004). The faunal and isotopic records indicate that the lower Omo Valley had higher proportions of woodland and forest through time than either the eastern or western sides of the Lake Turkana basin (Bobe and Behrensmeyer, 2004;Bobe and Leakey, 2009;Levin et al, 2011), with significant increases in grassland vegetation not occurring until after 2 Ma, in Members H through L. Bobe and Eck (2001) examined faunal change in the Shungura Formation and concluded that it was a real phenomenon unlikely to have resulted from taphonomic processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The faunal and isotopic records indicate that the lower Omo Valley had higher proportions of woodland and forest through time than either the eastern or western sides of the Lake Turkana basin (Bobe and Behrensmeyer, 2004;Bobe and Leakey, 2009;Levin et al, 2011), with significant increases in grassland vegetation not occurring until after 2 Ma, in Members H through L. Bobe and Eck (2001) examined faunal change in the Shungura Formation and concluded that it was a real phenomenon unlikely to have resulted from taphonomic processes. In Member B to lower Member G fluvial deposition predominated, and isolated teeth are frequently preserved.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bovid ecomorphology and hominin paleoenvironments of the Shungura Formation, lower Omo River Valley, Ethiopia

Plummer

Ferraro

Louys

et al. 2015

Journal of Human Evolution

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The Shungura Formation in the lower Omo River Valley, southern Ethiopia, has yielded an important paleontological and archeological record from the Pliocene and Pleistocene of eastern Africa. Fossils are common throughout the sequence and provide evidence of paleoenvironments and environmental change through time. This study developed discriminant function ecomorphology models that linked astragalus morphology to broadly defined habitat categories (open, light cover, heavy cover, forest, and wetlands) using modern bovids of known ecology. These models used seven variables suitable for use on fragmentary fossils and had overall classification success rates of > 82%. Four hundred and one fossils were analyzed from Shungura Formation members B through G (3.4 to 1.9 million years ago). Analysis by member documented the full range of ecomorph categories, demonstrating that a wide range of habitats existed along the axis of the paleo-Omo River.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Ecomorphology and Shungura Paleoenvironmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Bovid ecomorphology and hominin paleoenvironments of the Shungura Formation, lower Omo River Valley, Ethiopia

Plummer

Ferraro

Louys

et al. 2015

Journal of Human Evolution

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“…While the relationship between this shift in orbital cyclicity dominance and African faunal evolution at ca. 2.8 Ma has been the subject of considerable debate (e.g., Vrba, 1995Vrba, , 1999Bobe et al, 2002;Bobe and Behrensmeyer, 2004), little research has focused on the potential influence of paleoclimatic variability during precession-dominated times, which encompasses the entire pre-disconformity sequence at Hadar. Palynological evidence for climatic and vegetational variability at Hadar has been suggested to correlate well with global records (Bonnefille et al, 2004).…”

Section: Global Climate Cycles and The Local Sedimentary Recordmentioning

confidence: 99%

Connecting local environmental sequences to global climate patterns: evidence from the hominin-bearing Hadar Formation, Ethiopia

Campisano

Feibel

2007

Journal of Human Evolution

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The Creation of Food Worlds

Higman¹

2011

How Food Made History

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Although the modern food system has come to appear almost normal, many of its fundamental features are in fact very recent. Only recently have people lived in a world in which most food has been consumed by a dominant urbanindustrial population, heavily dependent on resources transported over great distances, from quite different environments and regions -the modern world in which "food miles" can add up to a worrying degree. Only in recent times have consumers in some countries come to think of food as a packaged good, to be obtained almost exclusively by purchase, and come to regard anything taken directly from the wild as potentially dangerous.Only in the past ten thousand years have human beings moved decisively toward living in sedentary settlements, using agricultural, horticultural, and pastoral techniques to produce food from domesticated plants and animals. Over the great length of human history, beginning with the emergence of Homo erectus in Africa two million years ago, some 90 per cent of hominin 1 species have lived by hunting and gathering. The experience for anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) is strikingly different, though covering little more than 200 000 years. The greater part of this period belonged to huntergatherers, and as late as the time of Columbus fully one-quarter of the world remained hunter-gatherer, but the massive and accelerating growth in population over the past two hundred years placed the weight of numbers within an agricultural realm. 1Hominin is preferred to hominid in identifying modern humans and their immediate bipedal relatives and ancestors. In the light of recent genetic findings, the term used previously to describe human-like primates -hominid -is now used to include also gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos (Barham and Mitchell, 2008: 1 and 476).

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The expansion of grassland ecosystems in Africa in relation to mammalian evolution and the origin of the genus Homo

Cited by 75 publications

References 0 publications

Bovid ecomorphology and hominin paleoenvironments of the Shungura Formation, lower Omo River Valley, Ethiopia

Bovid ecomorphology and hominin paleoenvironments of the Shungura Formation, lower Omo River Valley, Ethiopia

Connecting local environmental sequences to global climate patterns: evidence from the hominin-bearing Hadar Formation, Ethiopia

The Creation of Food Worlds

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