ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
An ecometric analysis of the fossil mammal record of the Turkana Basin.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lower speciation, not higher extinction, drove African megaherbivore diversity collapse.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Two major ecological shifts shaped 60 million years of ungulate faunal evolution.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A Highly Divergent Mitochondrial Genome in Extant Cape Buffalo From Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Ecometrics demonstrates that the functional dental traits of carnivoran communities are filtered by climate.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Fluctuating climate and dietary innovation drove ratcheted evolution of proboscidean dental traits.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Disruption of trait-environment relationships in African megafauna occurred in the middle Pleistocene.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Eco-ISEA3H, a machine learning ready spatial database for ecometric and species distribution modeling.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Plio-Pleistocene environmental variability in Africa and its implications for mammalian evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Do species factories exist? Detecting exceptional patterns of evolution in the mammalian fossil record.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Comparison of environmental inference approaches for ecometric analyses: Using hypsodonty to estimate precipitation.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Brain expansion in early hominins predicts carnivore extinctions in East Africa.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Early hominins evolved within non-analog ecosystems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- A tip of the hat to evolutionary change.Nature · 2017Article
- Article
- Aridity and hominin environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Body-size structure of Central Iberian mammal fauna reveals semidesertic conditions during the middle Miocene Global Cooling Event.PloS one · 2017Article
- Major transitions in human evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
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10 authors.
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Abstract
Although ecometric methods have been used to analyse fossil mammal faunas and environments of Eurasia and North America, such methods have not yet been applied to the rich fossil mammal record of eastern Africa. Here we report results from analysis of a combined dataset spanning east and west Turkana from Kenya between 7 and 1 million years ago (Ma). We provide temporally and spatially resolved estimates of temperature and precipitation and discuss their relationship to patterns of faunal change, and propose a new hypothesis to explain the lack of a temperature trend. We suggest that the regionally arid Turkana Basin may between 4 and 2 Ma have acted as a 'species factory', generating ecological adaptations in advance of the global trend. We show a persistent difference between the eastern and western sides of the Turkana Basin and suggest that the wetlands of the shallow eastern side could have provided additional humidity to the terrestrial ecosystems. Pending further research, a transient episode of faunal change centred at the time of the KBS Member (1.87-1.53 Ma), may be equally plausibly attributed to climate change or to a top-down ecological cascade initiated by the entry of technologically sophisticated humans.This article is part of the themed issue 'Major transitions in human evolution'.
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