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Publications (98)
There has been a long debate about the possibility of multiple contemporaneous species of Australopithecus in both eastern and southern Africa, potentially exhibiting different forms of bipedal locomotion. Here, we describe the previously unreported morphology of the os coxae in the 3.67 Ma Australopithecus prometheus StW 573 from Sterkfontein Memb...
SIGNIFICANCE: The hypothesis that >1500 Middle Pleistocene hominin bones represent the remains of complete corpses deposited deliberately in Rising Star Cave by conspecifics is provocative. This is because intentional handling of dead bodies might imply these hominins had developed a uniquely human sense of mortality salience >235 000 years ago. We...
The fossiliferous deposits within the lower-lying Jacovec Cavern in the locality of Sterkfontein yielded valuable hominin remains, including the StW 578 specimen. Because StW 578 mainly preserves the calotte, the taxonomic status of this specimen has been a matter of discussion. Within this context, here we employed high-resolution microtomography...
The earliest South African hominids (humans and their ancestral kin) belong to the genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo, with the oldest being a ca. 3.67 million-year-old nearly complete skeleton of Australopithecus (StW 573) from Sterkfontein Caves. This skeleton has provided, for the first time in almost a century of research, the full...
The StW 573 skeleton of Australopithecus prometheus from Sterkfontein Member 2 is some 93% complete and thus by far the most complete member of that genus yet found. Firmly dated at 3.67 Ma, it is one of the earliest specimens of its genus. A crucial aspect of interpretation of locomotor behaviour from fossil remains is an understanding of the pala...
The Early Pleistocene site of Swartkrans in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site has been significant for our understanding of the evolution of both early Homo and Paranthropus, as well as the earliest archaeology of southern Africa. Previous attempts to improve a faunal age estimate of the earliest deposit, Member 1, had produced...
The ca. 3.67 Ma adult skeleton known as ‘Little Foot’ (StW 573), recovered from Sterkfontein Member 2 breccia in the Silberberg Grotto, is remarkable for its morphology and completeness. Preservation of clavicles and scapulae, including essentially complete right-side elements, offers opportunities to assess morphological and functional aspects of...
Reconstruction of the locomotor repertoire of the australopiths (Australopithecus and Paranthropus) has progressively integrated information from the mechanosensitive internal structure of the appendicular skeleton. Recent investigations showed that the arrangement of the trabecular network at the femoral head center is biomechanically compatible w...
We describe late Pliocene and early Pleistocene hominin fossils from Sterkfontein Caves (South Africa), including two femoral specimens, as well as a partial tibia and a partial fibula. The fossils are likely assignable to Australopithecus africanus and/or Australopithecus prometheus and the morphology of each corroborates previous interpretations...
The reconstruction of perimortem and postmortem events is of critical importance to criminal investigations. In many cases, the information required for these reconstructions can be accessed through the analysis of skeletal remains. One particular class of skeletal data—trauma to the surfaces of bones, or bone surface modifications (BSMs)—can revea...
Pickering et al. (Nature 2018;565:226–229) utilised calcium carbonate flowstone deposits (i.e. speleothems) from eight Pliocene and Pleistocene South African Cradle of Humankind cave sites to propose that biases were created within the fossil record due to absent clastic sedimentation phases during wet periods, when caves were closed and only spele...
Functional morphology of the atlas reflects multiple aspects of an organism’s biology. More specifically, its shape indicates patterns of head mobility, while the size of its vascular foramina reflects blood flow to the brain. Anatomy and function of the early hominin atlas, and thus, its evolutionary history, are poorly documented because of a pau...
The site of the Sterkfontein Caves, South Africa, is one of the richest early hominin fossil-bearing sites in Africa. Recent excavations in the Milner Hall locality have contributed to the discovery of new hominin specimens, including StW 669, a right permanent maxillary first molar (M1). StW 669 was excavated from the T1 deposits, which consist of...
The Sterkfontein Caves is currently the world's richest Australopithecus-bearing site. Included in Sterkfontein's hominin assemblage is StW 573 ('Little Foot'), a near-complete Australopithecus skeleton discovered in Member 2 in the Silberberg Grotto. Because of its importance to the fossil hominin record, the geological age of StW 573 has been the...
Due to its completeness, the A.L. 288-1 (‘Lucy’) skeleton has long served as the archetypal bipedal Australopithecus. However, there remains considerable debate about its limb proportions. There are three competing, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, explanations for the high humerofemoral index of A.L. 288-1: (1) a retention of proportions fr...
Studies of the australopith (Australopithecus and Paranthropus) proximal femur have increasingly integrated information from the local arrangement of the cortical and cancellous bone to allow functional-biomechanical inferences on the locomotor behavioral patterns. In Australopithecus africanus and Para-nthropus robustus, the cancellous bone organi...
Objectives
A prevailing hypothesis in paleoanthropology is that early Pleistocene hominin bones were accumulated in South African caves by carnivores, which used those shelters, and the trees surrounding them, as refuge and feeding sites. We tested this hypothesis at the site of Drimolen, by comparing its hominin age‐at‐death distribution to that o...
One of the most crucial debates in human paleoneurology concerns the timing and mode of the emergence of the derived cerebral features in the hominin fossil record. Given its exceptional degree of preservation and geological age (i.e., 3.67 Ma), StW 573 (‘Little Foot’) has the potential to shed new light on hominin brain evolution. Here we present...
Due to its completeness, the A.L. 288-1 (Lucy) skeleton has long served as the archetypal bipedal Australopithecus . However, there remains considerable debate about its limb proportions. There are three competing, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, explanations for the high humerofemoral index of A.L. 288-1: (1) a retention of proportions fro...
The 3.67-million-year-old StW 573 Australopithecus skeleton is important for the light it sheds on the paleobiology of South African species of that genus, including, as discussed here, how the possible pathology of the specimen informs our understanding of Australopithecus behavior. The StW 573 antebrachium exhibits bilateral asymmetry, with signi...
Objectives
We provide descriptions and functional interpretations of 11 >2.0 Ma hominin vertebral and upper limb fossils from Sterkfontein.
Materials and methods
We employed taphonomic methods to describe postmortem damage observed on the fossils. We used osteometric tools and measurements to generate quantitative descriptions, which were added to...
The Sterkfontein Caves has an 80 year history of yielding remarkable evidence of hominin evolution and is currently the world's richest Australopithecus-bearing site. Included in Sterkfontein's hominin assemblage is StW 573 (Little Foot). Discovered in the Member 2 deposit in the Silberberg Grotto, StW 573 represents the most complete Australopithe...
(300 words)
StW 573, from Sterkfontein Member 2, dated ca 3.67 Ma, is by far the most complete skeleton of an australopith to date. Joint morphology is in many cases closely matched in available elements of Australopithecus anamensis ( eg. proximal and distal tibial and humeral joint-surfaces) and there are also close similarities to features of th...
The Sterkfontein Caves site is one of the richest early hominin localities in Africa. In addition to significant fossil assemblages from Members 2 and 4 of the Sterkfontein Formation, recent excavations have revealed hominin-bearing sedimentary deposits in the lesser-known Milner Hall. We describe two hominin cranial fragments excavated from the Mi...
The Australopithecus specimen StW 573 (“Little Foot”) was discovered in 1997 in Member 2 of the Sterkfontein Formation [1]. Besides its exceptional degree of preservation and completeness, the StW 573 skeleton is remarkable for its geological age with absolute dating having provided an age of 3.67 million years [2]. Accordingly, “Little Foot” repre...
We describe eleven hominin metacarpals and phalanges recovered from Jacovec Cavern and Member 4 of the Sterkfontein Formation between 1998 and 2003. Collectively, the fossils date in excess of 2.0 Ma, and are probably attributable to Australopithecus africanus and/or Australopithecus prometheus. When combined with results of previous studies on Aus...
The Sterkfontein Caves site is one of the richest early hominin fossil localities in Africa. More specifically, the fossiliferous deposits within the lower-lying Jacovec Cavern have yielded valuable hominin remains; prominent among them is the Australopithecus partial cranium StW 578. Due to the fragmentary nature of the braincase, the specimen has...
Significance
Awareness of self-mortality is a uniquely human capacity. Ritualistic treatment of corpses reflects this realization. Two large assemblages of fossil human bones from Spain (Sima de los Huesos, SH) and South Africa (Dinaledi Chamber, DC) are offered as the earliest evidence for mortuary behavior. This interpretation implies that humans...
Natural selection, as both a process and a scientific concept, is eloquently simple. Unfortunately, this simplicity sometimes belies Darwin’s broader view of evolution as a multifaceted process that proceeds from both ecological pressures and phylogenetic history. Darwin further understood that it is not just physical traits that are transmitted ge...
We describe a newly recognized partial right cuboid (catalogued as SKX 31899) of a medium-sized primate that derives from Member 3, a 0.96 ± 0.09-million-year-old sedimentary unit of the Swartkrans Formation (South Africa). Due to its fragmentary condition, we can provide only a basic interpretation of its functional morphology and, taxonomically,...
Modern humans are characterized by specialized hand morphology that is associated with advanced manipulative skills. Thus, there is important debate in paleoanthropology about the possible cause–effect relationship of this modern human-like (MHL) hand anatomy, its associated grips and the invention and use of stone tools by early hominins. Here we...
There is a long tradition of neotaphonomic research in paleontology and archaeology that is intended for building models of the bone-accumulating and -modifying behaviors of prehistoric biological actors. Building on that tradition, we present new data comparing the ways by which wild and captive leopards (Panthera pardus) altered the meat-bearing...
The Sterkfontein palaeokarst deposits, the richest repository of Australopithecus fossils in the world, are currently divided into six members (M1-M6) and named the Sterkfontein Formation ( Partridge and Watt, 1991). In this system, it was proposed that the passages and chambers deeper than the Silberberg Grotto formed most recently and are filled...
Neotaphonomic studies of large carnivores are used to create models in order to explain the formation of terrestrial vertebrate fossil faunas. The research reported here adds to the growing body of knowledge on the taphonomic consequences of large carnivore behavior in temperate habitats and has important implications for paleontology and archaeolo...
Recent excavations in Level 4 at BK (Bed II, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania) have yielded nine hominin teeth, a distal humerus fragment, a proximal radius with much of its shaft, a femur shaft, and a tibia shaft fragment (cataloged collectively as OH 80). Those elements identified more specifically than to simply Hominidae gen. et sp. indet are attributed...
Dental characters can provide vital clues for understanding intra- and intertaxonomic morphological variation and its underlying genetic and environmental components. However, the unambiguous identification of particular traits and their comparative study is often confounded by lack of consistent terminology in the relevant literature. This difficu...
Meat-eating was an important factor affecting early hominin brain expansion, social organization and geographic movement. Stone tool butchery marks on ungulate fossils in several African archaeological assemblages demonstrate a significant level of carnivory by Pleistocene hominins, but the discovery at Olduvai Gorge of a child's pathological crani...
Recent excavations at FLK North (Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania) have produced new information on the orientation of archaeological materials at various levels of the site. This information includes the uniform distribution of material azimuths, which contrasts with previous inferences of highly patterned orientations of materials in the Bed I archaeologi...
The stone tools and fossil bones from the earliest archaeological sites in Africa have been used over the past fifty years to create models that interpret how early hominins lived, foraged, behaved and communicated and how early and modern humans evolved. In this book, an international team of archaeologists and primatologists examines early Stone...
The stone tools and fossil bones from the earliest archaeological sites in Africa have been used over the past fifty years to create models that interpret how early hominins lived, foraged, behaved and communicated and how early and modern humans evolved. In this book, an international team of archaeologists and primatologists examines early Stone...
In order to assess further the recent claims of ∼3.4 Ma butchery marks on two fossil bones from the site of Dikika (Ethiopia), we broadened the actualistic-interpretive zooarchaeological framework by conducting butchery experiments that utilized naïve butchers and rocks unmodified by human flaking to deflesh chicken and sheep long limb bones. It is...
The essential roles of fire in human evolution and in humanity’s technological mastery of the natural world are disproportional to our understanding of its earliest domestication. Archaeologists researching relatively recent occurrences of fire, only after ~0.4 Ma and mostly in Europe, are particularly critical of earlier archaeological claims of f...
Taphonomic data are presented for a bone assemblage composed of the remains of seven baboons killed and eaten by wild leopards in Mapungubwe National Park (South Africa). Mortality and sex distributions of the sample meet theoretical expectations of a leopard-produced assemblage and skeletal part patterning, as well as gross patterns of bone modifi...
The world’s first archaeological traces from 2.6 million years ago (Ma) at Gona, in Ethiopia, include sharp-edged cutting tools and cut-marked animal bones, which indicate consumption of skeletal muscle by early hominin butchers. From that point, evidence of hominin meat-eating becomes increasingly more common throughout the Pleistocene archaeologi...
Renewed excavations at FLK Zinj and its surrounding landscape have yielded valuable information regarding its paleoecological situation and the prehistoric behavioral function of the site. The density of materials at the main cluster of the site excavated by Leakey contrasts with the bone and lithic scatters surrounding the site. The location of FL...
Age profiling of fossil faunal samples relies on the correlation of animal tooth-wear patterns with life history stages, but the criteria used to infer these stages are not necessarily valid. Here we redefine some commonly used prey age classes, such as “juvenile,” “prime-age adult,” and “old adult,” based on the variable characteristics of tooth w...
The announcement of two approximately 3.4-million-y-old purportedly butchered fossil bones from the Dikika paleoanthropological research area (Lower Awash Valley, Ethiopia) could profoundly alter our understanding of human evolution. Butchering damage on the Dikika bones would imply that tool-assisted meat-eating began approximately 800,000 y befor...
The use of referent taxa, and especially chimpanzee referents, in modeling human evolution has been harshly criticized. No doubt, chimpanzee data are often misused in models of early hominid behavior. But, those misuses are ex-amples of careless, formal analogizing. In contrast, it is equally possible to create non-trivial chimpanzee analogies. The...
We report on new research at Swartkrans Cave, South Africa, that provides evidence of two previously unrealized artifact- and fossil-bearing deposits. These deposits underlie a speleothem dated by the uranium-thorium disequilibrium technique to 110,000 ± 1,980 years old, the first tightly constrained, geochronological date available for the site. R...
C.K. Brain documented two interesting patterns in the Pleistocene faunas of Swartkrans Cave, South Africa: (1) The earliest depositional units, Members 1 and 2, preserve high numbers of hominid fossils, while the numbers drop sharply in the more recent Member 3. (2) Burned bone specimens, which seem to have been altered in fires tended by hominids,...
Handedness in humans has been linked to brain lateralization and the evolution of language, but recent data on chimpanzee tool use suggest that the lateralization of hand and brain function may have instead preceded the time when the hominid and panid lineages split. The hominid paleontological and archaeological records are two sources for testing...
It has been hypothesized that plant underground storage organs (USOs) played key roles in the initial hominin colonization of savanna habitats, the development of the distinctive skull and tooth morphology of the genus Australopithecus, and the evolution of the genus Homo by serving as “fallback foods” exploited during periods of food shortage. The...
Some chimpanzees use 2 types of tools to extract underground termites for consumption. Chimpanzees insert thin, flexible probes
into tunnels or holes in termite mounds (fishing), and sometimes use stouter, rigid sticks to first puncture the holes and
also possibly to fish. Many puncturing sticks have distinctive “brushed” ends. Researchers have hyp...
The common occurrence of hammerstone percussion damage (pits, striae, notches and impact flakes) on the fossil limb bones of ungulates indicates that marrow extraction has been an important component of hominid butchery for over two million years. Beyond this level of basic inference, it would be behaviorally informative if three deeper aspects of...
Recently, Alcántara García et al. (in press) presented a new method and criteria for distinguishing between fractures imparted by hominid hammerstone percussion and carnivores chewing on ‘green’ limb bones of ungulates. The method uses a combination of fracture plane and fracture angle data that are useful for elucidating the relative role of homin...
Newly recorded archaeological sites at Gona (Afar, Ethiopia) preserve both stone tools and faunal remains. These sites have also yielded the largest sample of cutmarked bones known from the time interval 2.58-2.1 million years ago (Ma). Most of the cutmarks on the Gona fauna possess obvious macroscopic (e.g., deep V-shaped cross-sections) and micro...
Determining the extent to which hominid- and carnivore-derived components of fossil bone palimpsests formed independently of each other can provide valuable information to paleoanthropologists interested in reconstructing the foraging adaptations of hominids. Because stone tool cutmarks, hammerstone percussion marks, and carnivore tooth marks are u...
New taphonomic data on the Sterkfontein Member 4 (South Africa) fossil hominid assemblage are presented. The previous estimate of hominid individuals represented in the deposit (45) is increased to 87. New minimum numbers of hominid skeletal elements are provided, and incidences of bone surface damage inflicted by prehistoric biological agents are...
Eight complete baboon carcasses were fed individually to two captive leopards. These experimental feedings generated two separate bone assemblages, one composed of those bone specimens not ingested by the leopards (i.e., the refuse assemblage), and one composed of those bone specimens ingested and subsequently voided by the leopards (i.e., the scat...
The ca. 1.0 myr old fauna from Swartkrans Member 3 (South Africa) preserves abundant indication of carnivore activity in the form of tooth marks (including pits) on many bone surfaces. This direct paleontological evidence is used to test a recent suggestion that leopards, regardless of prey body size, may have been almost solely responsible for the...
Recently, Lam et al. (J. Archaeol. Sci. (2003) in press) reviewed zooarchaeological studies of bulk bone mineral density (bulk BMD), demonstrating the degree to which several studies accurately assessed volumes at regions of interest (ROIs) on bones. It has been suggested that bulk BMD measurements obtained with a clinical computed tomography (CT)...
The reconstructed taphonomic and paleoenvironmental contexts of a ca. 4 million-year-old partial hominid skeleton (Stw 573) from Sterkfontein Member 2 are described through presentation of the results of our analyses of the mammalian faunal assemblage associated stratigraphically with the hominid. The assemblage is dominated by cercopithecoids (Par...
New data and interpretations presented in this paper update and augment the previous state of knowledge of early hominid subsistence behaviour at Swartkrans Cave during the formation of the Member 3 depositional unit (c. 1.0 million years ago). Unlike previous reconstructions of passive scavenging by early Pleistocene hominids in the Sterkfontein V...
Before the early 1980s, the prevailing orthodoxy in paleoanthropology considered Early Stone Age archeological sites in East Africa to represent a primitive form of hominid campsites. The faunal evidence preserved in these sites was viewed as the refuse of carcass meals provided by hominid males in a social system presumptively characterized by sex...
M.C. Stiner's (J. Archaeol. Sci. 29 (2002) 979) recent defense of anatomical regions profiling (ARP) prompted this response, because conclusions drawn from a large body of actualistic research, generated by numerous zooarchaeologists over the past 30+ years, are consistent in highlighting the differential survivorship of intra-element portions of l...
Plio-Pleistocene faunal assemblages from Swartkrans Cave (South Africa) preserve large numbers of primate remains. Brain, C.K., 1981. The Hunters or the Hunted? An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago suggested that these primate subassemblages might have resulted from a focus by carnivores on primate predati...
C. K. Brain (e.g., 1981) documented an interesting difference in relative skeletal part representation between primates and bovids of similar live body size recovered from the fossil cave site of Swartkrans (South Africa). Hominids and baboons are represented primarily by skull parts and a paucity of postcranial bones, while small sized bovids (Siz...
Zooarchaeologists have established several criteria for differentiating hominid- and hyena-derived faunal assemblages. In some cases, however, the patterns of skeletal part representation and bone surface modification on which these criteria are ultimately based have been observed in fossil bone assemblages of unknown origin, rather than in modern...
When, why, and how early humans began to eat meat are three of the most fundamental unresolved questions in the study of human origins. Before 2.5 million years ago the presence and importance of meat in the hominid diet is unkown. After stone tools appear in the fossil record it seems clear that meat was eaten in increasing quantities, but whether...
Carnivore defecation and regurgitation are taphonomic processes that create discrete concentrations of bone pieces and soft tissue fragments of animals that have been consumed. Experiments in which baboon carcasses were fed to leopards and spotted hyenas demonstrate that primate metapodials and phalanges are well represented as readily identifiable...
We report compositional data for several foods that comprise the annual diet among Hadza foragers near Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania. Samples collected during daily gathering trips over three fieldwork seasons were prepared according to Hadza methods. All three types of honey show moisture and starch levels similar to United States' honeys but hi...