Dietary options and behavior suggested by plant biomarker evidence in an early human habitat.

The availability of plants and freshwater shapes the diets and social behavior of chimpanzees, our closest living relative. However, limited evidence about the spatial relationships shared between ancestral human (hominin) remains, edible resources, refuge, and freshwater leaves the influence of local resources on our species' evolution open to debate. Exceptionally well-preserved organic geochemical fossils--biomarkers--preserved in a soil horizon resolve different plant communities at meter scales across a contiguous 25,000 m(2) archaeological land surface at Olduvai Gorge from about 2 Ma. Biomarkers reveal hominins had access to aquatic plants and protective woods in a patchwork landscape, which included a spring-fed wetland near a woodland that both were surrounded by open grassland. Numerous cut-marked animal bones are located within the wooded area, and within meters of wetland vegetation delineated by biomarkers for ferns and sedges. Taken together, plant biomarkers, clustered bone debris, and hominin remains define a clear spatial pattern that places animal butchery amid the refuge of an isolated forest patch and near freshwater with diverse edible resources.

Late Pliocene Homo and hominid land use from Western Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.

Excavation in the previously little-explored western portion of Olduvai Gorge indicates that hominid land use of the eastern paleobasin extended at least episodically to the west. Finds included a dentally complete Homo maxilla (OH 65) with lower face, Oldowan stone artifacts, and butchery-marked bones dated to be between 1.84 and 1.79 million years old. The hominid shows strong affinities to the KNM ER 1470 cranium from Kenya (Homo rudolfensis), a morphotype previously unrecognized at Olduvai. ER 1470 and OH 65 can be accommodated in the H. habilis holotype, casting doubt on H. rudolfensis as a biologically valid taxon.