Isotopic evidence of early hominin diets
نویسندگان
چکیده
Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309; Department of Anthropology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA 94118; Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112; Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794; Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287; Turkana Basin Institute, 00502 Nairobi, Kenya; Research Laboratory for Archaeology, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom; Department of Earth Sciences, National Museums of Kenya, 00100 Nairobi, Kenya; Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, Department of Anthropology, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052; and Department of Geology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620
منابع مشابه
Stable isotopes in fossil hominin tooth enamel suggest a fundamental dietary shift in the Pliocene.
Accumulating isotopic evidence from fossil hominin tooth enamel has provided unexpected insights into early hominin dietary ecology. Among the South African australopiths, these data demonstrate significant contributions to the diet of carbon originally fixed by C(4) photosynthesis, consisting of C(4) tropical/savannah grasses and certain sedges, and/or animals eating C(4) foods. Moreover, high...
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The stable carbon isotope ratio of fossil tooth enamel carbonate is determined by the photosynthetic systems of plants at the base of the animal's foodweb. In subtropical Africa, grasses and many sedges have C(4)photosynthesis and transmit their characteristically enriched 13C/(12)C ratios (more positive delta13C values) along the foodchain to consumers. We report here a carbon isotope study of...
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Our understanding of early human diets is based on reconstructed biomechanics of hominin jaws, bone and teeth isotopic data, tooth wear patterns, lithic, taphonomic and zooarchaeological data, which do not provide information about the relative amounts of different types of foods that contributed most to early human diets. Faecal biomarkers are proving to be a valuable tool in identifying relat...
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