Project Details
Projekt
Early Hominin Adaptation in the Southern East African Rift
Applicant
Dr. Tina Lüdecke
Subject Area
Palaeontology
Term
from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 339236426
Over 150 years of extensive hominin research still leaves several fundamental questions about the evolution of our early ancestors. Research subjects such as foraging strategies of early stages of the lineages of Homo sp. and Paranthropus boisei, their adaptation to climate change, as well as the associated paleoecology close to major grass- and woodland boundaries have not yet been examined. Stable-isotope based research of East African Homo sp. and Paranthropus boisei diet is mainly limited to fossil evidence from the Eastern Branch of the East African Rift (EAR), mainly the Turkana Basin. At 2 Ma, two groups with distinct foraging strategies were simultaneously present: P. boisei consumed a C4 dominated diet, whereas Homo consumed a higher fraction of C3 resources. These results are concurrent with a biome shift towards increasingly open C4 grasslands in a continuously hot environment, which ultimately developed into the modern grassland-dominated Somali-Masai Endemic Zone. Data that constrain the origin, timing and evolution of the dietary offset of Homo and P. boisei during their early evolutionary stages are lacking, due to extremely rare fossil discoveries of that time (prior 2 Ma).In contrast to the Eastern Branch of the EAR, this project focuses on two hominin sites in the largely underexplored southern part of the EAR: (1) the Plio-Pleistocene Chiwondo/Chitimwe Beds (Karonga Basin, N Malawi), which host the only early hominin locality in today's wooded Zambezian Savanna that comprise H. rudolfensis and P. boisei fossils, and (2) the Pleistocene H. erectus yielding Manyara Beds (Manyara Basin, N Tanzania), located just north of a major savanna boundary in today's C4 grass-dominated Somali-Masai Endemic Zone. The project stands to benefit from excellent facilities in order to study early hominin adaptation: novel methods of clumped isotope geochemistry and U-Pb dating of soil carbonates in addition to the well-established d13C, d18O and dD isotope techniques. The allocation of exclusive Senckenberg collection material, which includes on of the earliest fossils of the genera Homo, as well as the use of Lake Malawi ICDP drill core materials and newly collected samples in the field, is a unique added value. This project addresses three work packages: I) Diet of early Homo rudolfensis and Paranthropus boisei from the southern part of the EAR, II) Plio-Pleistocene paleotemperatures of Southeast African savanna ecosystems, and III) Plio-Pleistocene paleovegetation of the Manyara Basin. These lead to the overarching synthesis of comparing Plio-Pleistocene African paleotemperatures, ecosystem patterns and early hominin diet across a woodland-grassland savanna boundary.The necessary geochronological framework will be obtained through U-Pb dating of soil carbonate, which will provide the first absolute ages for the poorly dated Plio-Pleistocene Karonga Basin fossil bearing deposits.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
Cooperation Partners
Professor Dr. Andreas Mulch; Professor Dr. Friedemann Schrenk
