New site at Olduvai Gorge (AGS, Bed I, 1.84 Mya) widens the range of locations where hominins engaged in butchery.

ABSTRACT: Outstanding questions about human evolution include systematic connections between critical landscape resources-such as water and food-and how these shaped the competitive and biodiverse environment(s) that our ancestors inhabited. Here, we report fossil n-alkyl lipid biomarkers and their associated δ¹³C values across a newly discovered Olduvai Gorge site (AGS) dated to 1.84 million years ago, enabling a multiproxy analysis of the distributions of critical local landscape resources across an explicit locus of hominin activity. Our results reveal that AGS was a seasonally waterlogged, largely unvegetated lakeside site situated near an ephemeral freshwater river surrounded by arid-adapted C4 grasses. The sparse vegetation at AGS contrasts with reconstructed (micro)habitats at the

SUBMITTER: Stancampiano LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9192694 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature