South African Homininis

Collaborators: A. Martinez-Garcia (MPIC), M. Bamford and D. Stratford (ESI and U Witwatersrand), and others.

The overarching goal of this pilot study is to reconstruct the position of southern African Australopithecus in its paleo-food web to evaluate the consumption of animal vs. plant resources in this taxon. We first analyzed carbon, nitrogen and oxygen isotope compromissions of the mammalian fauna at Sterkfontein Member 4 (~2.6 to 2.2 Ma) to establish an isotope baseline for contextualizing hominin values. We then measured the tooth enamel of seven Australopithecus specimens. Our results represent the first δ¹⁵N_enamel dataset for early Pleistocene hominins and the only nitrogen isotope data for terrestrial vertebrates older than 120,000 years.