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      New site at Olduvai Gorge (AGS, Bed I, 1.84 Mya) widens the range of locations where hominins engaged in butchery

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          Abstract

          Outstanding questions about human evolution include systematic connections between critical landscape resources—such as water and food—and how these shaped the competitive and biodiverse environment(s) that our ancestors inhabited. Here, we report fossil n-alkyl lipid biomarkers and their associated δ 13C values across a newly discovered Olduvai Gorge site (AGS) dated to 1.84 million years ago, enabling a multiproxy analysis of the distributions of critical local landscape resources across an explicit locus of hominin activity. Our results reveal that AGS was a seasonally waterlogged, largely unvegetated lakeside site situated near an ephemeral freshwater river surrounded by arid-adapted C4 grasses. The sparse vegetation at AGS contrasts with reconstructed (micro)habitats at the other anthropogenic sites at Olduvai Gorge, suggesting that central-provisioning places depended more heavily on water access than vegetation viz. woody plants as is often observed for modern hunter-gatherers. As hominins at AGS performed similar butchering activities as at other Bed I sites, our results suggest they did not need the shelter of trees and thus occupied a competitive position within the predatory guild.

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          The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis: The Brain and the Digestive System in Human and Primate Evolution

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            Organic geochemical indicators of palaeoenvironmental conditions of sedimentation

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              Woody cover and hominin environments in the past 6 million years.

              The role of African savannahs in the evolution of early hominins has been debated for nearly a century. Resolution of this issue has been hindered by difficulty in quantifying the fraction of woody cover in the fossil record. Here we show that the fraction of woody cover in tropical ecosystems can be quantified using stable carbon isotopes in soils. Furthermore, we use fossil soils from hominin sites in the Awash and Omo-Turkana basins in eastern Africa to reconstruct the fraction of woody cover since the Late Miocene epoch (about 7 million years ago). (13)C/(12)C ratio data from 1,300 palaeosols at or adjacent to hominin sites dating to at least 6 million years ago show that woody cover was predominantly less than ∼40% at most sites. These data point to the prevalence of open environments at the majority of hominin fossil sites in eastern Africa over the past 6 million years.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                ls80@hw.ac.uk
                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2045-2322
                13 June 2022
                13 June 2022
                2022
                : 12
                : 9794
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.9531.e, ISNI 0000000106567444, Lyell Centre at Heriot Watt University, ; Edinburgh, UK
                [2 ]GRID grid.5254.6, ISNI 0000 0001 0674 042X, University of Copenhagen, ; Copenhagen, Denmark
                [3 ]GRID grid.116068.8, ISNI 0000 0001 2341 2786, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ; Cambridge, USA
                [4 ]GRID grid.7159.a, ISNI 0000 0004 1937 0239, Institute of Evolution in Africa (IDEA), , University of Alcalá, ; Madrid, Spain
                [5 ]GRID grid.4795.f, ISNI 0000 0001 2157 7667, Complutense University, ; Madrid, Spain
                [6 ]GRID grid.11762.33, ISNI 0000 0001 2180 1817, University of Salamanca, ; Ávila, Spain
                [7 ]GRID grid.418921.7, ISNI 0000 0001 2348 8190, Regional Archaeological Museum of the Community of Madrid, ; Madrid, Spain
                [8 ]GRID grid.8193.3, ISNI 0000 0004 0648 0244, University of Dar es Salaam, ; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
                [9 ]GRID grid.21940.3e, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8278, Department of Anthropology, , Rice University, ; Houston, TX 77005-1827 USA
                Article
                14031
                10.1038/s41598-022-14031-1
                9192694
                35697774
                d043b1da-1b17-4c27-b19d-103aad9b5c2b
                © The Author(s) 2022

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 21 February 2022
                : 31 May 2022
                Categories
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                © The Author(s) 2022

                Uncategorized
                lipids,anthropology,archaeology,ecology,environmental chemistry
                Uncategorized
                lipids, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, environmental chemistry

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