ArticleNature communications2021
Earliest Olduvai hominins exploited unstable environments ~ 2 million years ago.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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8 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Seasonal-to-interannual hydroclimatic variability in Afromontane environments during the late Early Pleistocene hominin occupations on the Southeastern Ethiopian Highlands.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A regional-scale mobility model for the early hominin occupation of the Lower Omo Valley (Ethiopia).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- What do we know about treelines of the Anthropocene in High Asia?Plant diversity · 2025Review
- Selective use of distant stone resources by the earliest Oldowan toolmakers.Science advances · 2025Article
- Flake production: A universal by-product of primate stone percussion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Arid, mosaic environments during the Plio-Pleistocene transition and early hominin dispersals in northern Africa.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The Pleistocene high-elevation environments between 2.02 and 0.6 Ma at Melka Kunture (Upper Awash Valley, Ethiopia) based upon stable isotope analysis.Scientific reports · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
29 authors at 13 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Rapid environmental change is a catalyst for human evolution, driving dietary innovations, habitat diversification, and dispersal. However, there is a dearth of information to assess hominin adaptions to changing physiography during key evolutionary stages such as the early Pleistocene. Here we report a multiproxy dataset from Ewass Oldupa, in the Western Plio-Pleistocene rift basin of Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai), Tanzania, to address this lacuna and offer an ecological perspective on human adaptability two million years ago. Oldupai's earliest hominins sequentially inhabited the floodplains of sinuous channels, then river-influenced contexts, which now comprises the oldest palaeolake setting documented regionally. Early Oldowan tools reveal a homogenous technology to utilise diverse, rapidly changing environments that ranged from fern meadows to woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, to lakeside woodland/palm groves as well as hyper-xeric steppes. Hominins periodically used emerging landscapes and disturbance biomes multiple times over 235,000 years, thus predating by more than 180,000 years the earliest known hominins and Oldowan industries from the Eastern side of the basin.
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