TY - JOUR
T1 - Earliest Olduvai hominins exploited unstable environments ~ 2 million years ago
AU - Mercader, Julio
AU - Akuku, Pam
AU - Boivin, Nicole L.
AU - Bugumba, Revocatus
AU - Bushozi, Pastory
AU - Carmacho, Alfredo
AU - Carter, Tristan
AU - Clarke, Siobhan
AU - Cueva-Temprana, Arturo
AU - Durkin, Paul
AU - Favreau, Julien
AU - Fella, Kelvin
AU - Haberle, Simon
AU - Hubbard, Stephen
AU - Inwood, Jamie
AU - Itambu, Makarius
AU - Koromo, Samson
AU - Lee, Patrick
AU - Mohammed, Abdallah
AU - Mwambwiga, Aloyce
AU - Olesilau, Lucas
AU - Patalano, Robert
AU - Roberts, Patrick
AU - Rule, Susan
AU - Saladie, Palmira
AU - Siljedal, Gunnar
AU - Soto, Maria
AU - Umbsaar, Jonathan
AU - Petraglia, Michael
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Rapid environmental change is a catalyst for human evolution, driving dietary innovations, habitat diversification, and dispersal. However, there is a dearth of information to assess hominin adaptions to changing physiography during key evolutionary stages such as the early Pleistocene. Here we report a multiproxy dataset from Ewass Oldupa, in the Western Plio-Pleistocene rift basin of Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai), Tanzania, to address this lacuna and offer an ecological perspective on human adaptability two million years ago. Oldupai�s earliest hominins sequentially inhabited the floodplains of sinuous channels, then river-influenced contexts, which now comprises the oldest palaeolake setting documented regionally. Early Oldowan tools reveal a homogenous technology to utilise diverse, rapidly changing environments that ranged from fern meadows to woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, to lakeside woodland/palm groves as well as hyper-xeric steppes. Hominins periodically used emerging landscapes and disturbance biomes multiple times over 235,000 years, thus predating by more than 180,000 years the earliest known hominins and Oldowan industries from the Eastern side of the basin.
AB - Rapid environmental change is a catalyst for human evolution, driving dietary innovations, habitat diversification, and dispersal. However, there is a dearth of information to assess hominin adaptions to changing physiography during key evolutionary stages such as the early Pleistocene. Here we report a multiproxy dataset from Ewass Oldupa, in the Western Plio-Pleistocene rift basin of Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai), Tanzania, to address this lacuna and offer an ecological perspective on human adaptability two million years ago. Oldupai�s earliest hominins sequentially inhabited the floodplains of sinuous channels, then river-influenced contexts, which now comprises the oldest palaeolake setting documented regionally. Early Oldowan tools reveal a homogenous technology to utilise diverse, rapidly changing environments that ranged from fern meadows to woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, to lakeside woodland/palm groves as well as hyper-xeric steppes. Hominins periodically used emerging landscapes and disturbance biomes multiple times over 235,000 years, thus predating by more than 180,000 years the earliest known hominins and Oldowan industries from the Eastern side of the basin.
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-020-20176-2
DO - 10.1038/s41467-020-20176-2
M3 - Article
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
ER -