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Climate-averaging of terrestrial faunas: an example from the Plio-Pleistocene of South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

Philip J. Hopley  and
Mark A. Maslin
Philip J. Hopley
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]
Mark A. Maslin
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Fundamental to the interpretation of bone-bearing faunal deposits is an understanding of the taphonomic processes that have modified the once living fossil community. An often neglected source of bias is that of climate-averaging, which occurs when the duration of bone accumulation exceeds the duration of an individual climatic episode. Tropical and subtropical climate change is dominated by precessional cyclicity (~21,000 year cycle), which controls monsoon rainfall intensity and thus plant communities over time. Under a climate-averaging scenario, the paleoecological characteristics of a faunal deposit represent an amalgamation of more than one phase of the precessional cycle. We investigate the degree of climate-averaging in Plio-Pleistocene bone breccias from South Africa by comparing stable isotope measurements of fossil enamel with the evidence from high-resolution speleothem paleoclimate proxies. We conclude that each of the four faunal assemblages studied are climate-averaged, having formed over a time period in excess of one-third of a precessional cycle (~7000 years). This has implications for the reconstruction of hominin paleoenvironments and estimates of Plio-Pleistocene biodiversity. We hypothesize that climate-averaging may be a common feature of tropical terrestrial vertebrate assemblages throughout the Cenozoic and Mesozoic.

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Articles
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 32 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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