ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Early hominins evolved within non-analog ecosystems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lower speciation, not higher extinction, drove African megaherbivore diversity collapse.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Bioenergetic trophic trade-offs determine mass-dependent extinction thresholds across the Cenozoic.Ecology · 2026Article
- No evidence that hominin dispersal across Eurasia was part of a wider turnover in mammal distributions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Targeting the Hunting Hypothesis: Review of Evidence From the Hadza.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- The Late-Quaternary Extinctions Gave Rise to Functionally Novel Herbivore Assemblages.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- A Highly Divergent Mitochondrial Genome in Extant Cape Buffalo From Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- A bioenergetic approach favors the preservation and protection of prey, not cooking, as the drivers of early fire.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Long-term biotic homogenization in the East African Rift System over the last 6 million years of hominin evolution.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Dart and the Taung juvenile: making sense of a century-old record of hominin evolution in Africa.Biology letters · 2024Review
- Limited herbivore migration during the Last Glacial Period of Kenya.Nature ecology & 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
- Evolutionary causes and consequences of ungulate migration.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Large-herbivore nemabiomes: patterns of parasite diversity and sharing.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Global long-term stability of individual dietary specialization in herbivorous mammals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- A multi-proxy approach to exploring Homo sapiens' arrival, environments and adaptations in Southeast Asia.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Contracting eastern African CScientific reports · 2021Article
- Erosion of global functional diversity across the tree of life.Science advances · 2021Article
- Tectonics, climate and the diversification of the tropical African terrestrial flora and fauna.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2021Article
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Abstract
Present-day African ecosystems serve as referential models for conceptualizing the environmental context of early hominin evolution, but the degree to which modern ecosystems are representative of those in the past is unclear. A growing body of evidence from eastern Africa's rich and well-dated late Cenozoic fossil record documents communities of large-bodied mammalian herbivores with ecological structures differing dramatically from those of the present day, implying that modern communities may not be suitable analogs for the ancient ecosystems of hominin evolution. To determine when and why the ecological structure of eastern Africa's herbivore faunas came to resemble those of the present, here we analyze functional trait changes in a comprehensive dataset of 305 modern and fossil herbivore communities spanning the last ∼7 Myr. We show that nearly all communities prior to ∼700 ka were functionally non-analog, largely due to a greater richness of non-ruminants and megaherbivores (species >1,000 kg). The emergence of functionally modern communities precedes that of taxonomically modern communities by 100,000s of years, and can be attributed to the combined influence of Plio-Pleistocene C
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