We thank John Kingston, Cliff Jolly, Don Reid, Albert Colman, Gregory Green, Meave Leakey, Louise Leakey, Laura MacLatchy, Patrick Roberts, James Rossie, Kevin Uno, Petra Vaiglova, Erin Wessling, and Andrew Yegian for helpful discussions of this research the Wenner-Gren Research on Eastern African Catarrhine and Hominoid Evolution (REACHE) workshop for facilitating discussions Zoro Goné Bi and Roman Wittig for providing data on chimpanzee seasonal feeding behavior Christine Austin and Manish Arora for running trace-element analyses of the baboons and Jason Curtis for running isotope analyses on the fauna. Reid, Reiko Matsuda Goodwin, Genevieve Fisher, Job Kibii, and Fredrick Manthi provided access to samples housed at Durham University (the Newcastle Collection), Peabody Museum (Harvard University), and National Museums of Kenya, respectively. This work is part of the REACHE Project, and this is REACHE Publication #20.
This study was funded by the Australian Academy of Science’s Regional Collaborations Programme, the Australian National University, the Australian Research Council (DP210101913), Griffith University, the American School of Prehistoric Research at Harvard University, Columbia University’s Earth Institute, US NSF Award EAR 2021666, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant CONF-727, “Early Adaptive Evolution of the Hominoidea,” awarded to S.C., Fredrick Manthi, Laura MacLatchy, and Kieran McNulty. These results reveal unprecedented environmental histories in primate teeth and suggest a framework for evaluating climate change and primate paleoecology throughout the Cenozoic.ĭonald J.
Developmentally informed microsampling recovers greater ecological complexity than conventional isotope sampling the two Miocene apes ( n = 248 near weekly measurements) evince as great a range of seasonal δ 18O variation as more time-averaged bulk measurements from 101 eastern African Plio-Pleistocene hominins and 42 papionins spanning 4 million y. Reliance on fallback foods during documented dry seasons potentially contributed to novel dental features long considered adaptations to hard-object feeding. This large-bodied Miocene ape consumed seasonally variable food and water sources enriched in 18O compared to contemporaneous terrestrial fauna ( n = 66 fossil specimens). Afropithecus’ δ 18O fluctuations are intermediate in magnitude between those measured at high resolution in baboons ( Papio spp.) living across a gradient of aridity and modern forest-dwelling chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes verus). We leverage these data to contextualize the first δ 18O values of two 17 Ma Afropithecus turkanensis individuals from Kalodirr, Kenya, from which we infer variably bimodal wet seasons, supported by rainfall reconstructions in a global Earth system model. Oxygen isotope compositions (δ 18O values) sampled at high spatial resolution in the dentitions of modern African primates ( n = 2,352 near weekly measurements from 26 teeth) track concurrent seasonal precipitation, regional climatic patterns, discrete meteorological events, and niche partitioning.
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Variability in resource availability is hypothesized to be a significant driver of primate adaptation and evolution, but most paleoclimate proxies cannot recover environmental seasonality on the scale of an individual lifespan.