Earliest Olduvai hominins exploited unstable environments ~ 2 million years ago
Date
2021-01-07
Authors
Mercader, Julio
Akuku, Pam
Boivin, Nicole
Bugumba, Revocatus
Bushozi, Pastory
Camacho, Alfredo
Carter, Tristan
Clarke, Siobhán
Cueva-Temprana, Arturo
Durkin, Paul
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Nature Research
Abstract
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 PlioPleistocene 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.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Collections
Source
Nature Communications
Type
Journal article
Book Title
Entity type
Access Statement
Open Access
License Rights
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Restricted until
Downloads
File
Description