Modern African ecosystems as landscape-scale analogues for reconstructing woody cover and early hominin environments

Abstract

Reconstructing habitat types available to hominins and inferring how the paleo-landscape changed through time are critical steps in testing hypotheses about the selective pressures that drove the emergence of bipedalism, tool use, a change in diet, and progressive encephalization. Change in the amount and distribution of woody vegetation has been suggested as one of the important factors that shaped early hominin evolution. Previous models for reconstructing woody cover at eastern African hominin fossil sites used global-scale modern soil comparative datasets. Our higher-spatial-resolution study of carbon isotopes in soil organic matter is based on 26 modern African locations, ranging from tropical grass-dominated savannas to forests. We used this dataset to generate a new Eastern Africa–specific Woody Cover Model (EAWCM), which indicates that eastern African hominin sites were up to 13% more wooded than reconstructions based on previous models. Reconstructions using the EAWCM indicate widespread woodlands/bushlands and wooded grasslands and a shift toward C₄-dominated landscapes in eastern Africa over the last 6 million years. Our results indicate that mixed tree–C₄ grass savannas with 10–80% tree cover (but not pure grasslands with <10 % tree cover) dominated early hominin paleoenvironments. Landscapes with these biomes are marked by exceptional heterogeneity, which posed challenges and offered opportunities to early hominins that likely contributed to major behavioral and morphological shifts in the hominin clade.