Paleoenvironmental implications of Stable Isotope analyses of Micromammal teeth from Pinnacle Point (Mossel Bay, South Africa)

Summary

Paleoenvironmental proxies sample past environments at a number of geographic scales including regional, sub-regional, and local. Given species’ small home ranges and often-specific habitat requirements, isotopic data from micromammal fossil teeth are increasingly recognized as abundant potential reservoirs of local-scale paleoenvironmental proxy data. Elucidating differences between local and regional vegetation provides a context for understanding landscape-scale environmental variation, which is important for modeling a number of aspects of the behavioral ecology of past human populations.

We present an overview of the results of LA-GC-IRMS sampling of fossil micromammal teeth recovered from three localities at Pinnacle Point (PP) South Africa (PP30, PP9C, PP13B) spanning 380-90 ka. Analysis of the δ13C and δ18O data suggests some interspecific differences in the isotopic ecology of the small mammal taxa. Taxon-specific analysis of the isotopic composition of the micromammal data set over time is suggestive of small but probably significant changes in the composition of vegetation immediately local to the sites. Comparison of the micromammal stable isotope data with other proxy records suggests that, although there are small differences in the environments different proxies sample, there is concordance between these data sets that capture local (speleothem, micromammal) and regional (large fauna) environmental signals.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Building the hunter-gatherer’s paleoscape on the South African coast: Environment, landscape, and foraging resources   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage