Lecture 16 - Omo/Turkana Flashcards
Omo Turkama Basin
Shungura Formation
- Omo river is draining the highland plateau into the lake → reveals fossils (?)
- nearly 3 ½ million years of mammal and human fossils captured by Shungura formation
- hominin fossils are known, but mostly isolated teeth
- incredibly rich record of mammalian evolution for 2+ Ma, including origin of Homo
Omo Turkana
East Turkana (Koobi Fora) & West Turkana
- most fossiliforous/important site in the sheer number of skulls found in Koobi Fora
- Koobi Fora = eastern side of the lake
- fossils younger than those in sites of Aramis and Hadar
- West Turkana –> nearly complete skeleton of “Turkana Boy” and the same species as KNM-ER 3733 (Homo erectus)
Rene Bobe & Behrensmeyer
“Faunal change, environmental variability, and late Pliocene hominin evolution”
* subset of Shungura, Mursi, Usno site animals - Bovidae, Suidae, Cercopithecidae, Hominidae
* main question - How do proportions of major groups change through time?
–> pattern 1: as Bovids increase in proportion, Suids decrease
paper questions
Turkana Basin is very important because it is a long record from one place… why is this so important?
helps rule out faunal and environmental changes that could be due to environmental changes
paper questions
How could we determine that changes in faunal abundance aren’t simply result of taphonomy differences?
- taphonomy - process of what happens to an organism after it dies
- depositional settings
–> in a lake/basin less transport of elements
–> in a river - high energy water movement that transports fossils more, so more likely damaged
paper questions
What were the results in terms of taphonomic signal? (Kay)
- very little change - figure 3
- change not caused by depositional setting but instead by environmental
paper questions
To what do they attribute changes in abundance of different groups? (Bobe, 2002)
Taxonomic definition and functional characteristics used to create groups
