Hominin Environments in the East African Pliocene An Assessment of the Faunal Evidence

About this book

Brings together fauna analysts working at many sites spanning the East African pliocene. Although most chapters focus on the vertebrate fauna of particular localities, authors take a broad approach that seeks to compare paleoenvironmental and paleoecological patterns across localities and among various taxonomic groups. This volume aims to synthesize large amounts of faunal data, and to present the evolution of East African vertebrates in the context of environmental and climatic changes during the Pliocene.

Contents

1: Approaches to the analysis of faunal change during the East African Pliocene; 2: Environmental hypotheses of Pliocene human evolution; 3: African Pliocene and Pleistocene cercopithecid evolution and global climatic change; 4: Patterns of change in the Plio-Pleistocene carnivorans of eastern Africa: implications for hominin evolution; 5: Stratigraphic variation in Suidae from the Shungura Formation and some coeval deposits; 6: Patterns of abundance and diversity in late Cenozoic bovids from the Turkana and Hadar Basins, Kenya and Ethiopia; 7: Comparability of fossil data and its significance for the interpretation of hominin envrironments: a case study in the lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia; 8: The effects of collection strategy and effort on faunal recovery: a case study of the American and French collections from the Shungura Formation, Ethiopia; 9: Serengeti micromammals and their implications for Olduvai paleoenvironments; 10: Taphonomy and paleoecological context of the Upper Laetolil Beds (Localities 8 and 9), Laetoli in northern Tanzania; 11: The paleoecology of the Upper Laetolil Beds at Laetoli: a reconsideration of the large mammal ; 12: Fauna, taphonomy and ecology of the Plio-Pleistocene Chiwondo Beds, Northern Malawi; Finale and future: investigating faunal evidence for hominin paleoecology in East Africa

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