Op 15-02-2024 om 21:55 schreef Marc Verhaegen:

Pleistocene footprints show intensive use of lake margin habitats by Homo erectus groups
Neil Roach cs 2016 Scient.Rep.121 doi 10.1038/srep26374

Reconstructing hominin paleo-ecology is critical for understanding our ancestors’ diets, social organizations & interactions with other animals.
Most paleo-ecological models lack fine-scale resolution, due to fossil hominin scarcity & the time-averaged accumulation of faunal assemblages.

Here we present data from 481 fossil tracks from NW-Kenya, incl. 97 hominin footprints attributed to H.erectus.
These tracks are found in multiple sedimentary layers spanning c 20 ky. Taphonomic experiments show:
each of these trackways represents minutes to no more than a few days in the lives of the individuals moving across these paleo-landscapes.
The geology & associated vertebrate fauna place these tracks in a deltaic setting, near a lake-shore bordered by open grasslands.
Hominin footprints are disproportionately abundant in this lake margin environment, relative to hominin skeletal fossil frequency in the same deposits.
Accounting for preservation bias, this abundance of hominin footprints indicates repeated use of lake-shore habitats by H.erectus.
Clusters of very large prints moving in the same direction further suggest: these hominins traversed this lake-shore in multi-male groups.
Such reliance on near water environments, and possibly aquatic-linked foods, may have influenced hominin foraging behavior & migratory routes across & out of Africa.

This study was included in Foister at al.(2023):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.22005

Overall it shows that wetland was a small proportion of environments of
early Pleistocene Homo (see fig.2).

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