Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Nature. 2011 Jun 2;474(7349):76-8. doi: 10.1038/nature10149.
Ranging and residence patterns among early hominins have been indirectly inferred from morphology, stone-tool sourcing, referential models and phylogenetic models. However, the highly uncertain nature of such reconstructions limits our understanding of early hominin ecology, biology, social structure and evolution. We investigated landscape use in Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus from the Sterkfontein and Swartkrans cave sites in South Africa using strontium isotope analysis, a method that can help to identify the geological substrate on which an animal lived during tooth mineralization. Here we show that a higher proportion of small hominins than large hominins had non-local strontium isotope compositions. Given the relatively high levels of sexual dimorphism in early hominins, the smaller teeth are likely to represent female individuals, thus indicating that females were more likely than males to disperse from their natal groups. This is similar to the dispersal pattern found in chimpanzees, bonobos and many human groups, but dissimilar from that of most gorillas and other primates. The small proportion of demonstrably non-local large hominin individuals could indicate that male australopiths had relatively small home ranges, or that they preferred dolomitic landscapes.
早期人类的分布范围和居住模式是通过形态学、石器原料来源、参照模型和系统发育模型来间接推断的。然而，这些重建的高度不确定性限制了我们对早期人类生态学、生物学、社会结构和进化的理解。我们使用锶同位素分析方法研究了南非斯特克方丹和斯瓦特克朗斯洞穴遗址中的南方古猿和粗壮南方古猿的景观利用情况，这种方法可以帮助确定动物在牙齿矿化过程中生活的地质基底。研究结果表明，与大型人类相比，小型人类具有非本地锶同位素组成的比例更高。鉴于早期人类具有较高的性别二态性，较小的牙齿可能代表女性个体，这表明女性比男性更有可能从其出生地群体中分散。这与黑猩猩、倭黑猩猩和许多人类群体中的扩散模式相似，但与大多数大猩猩和其他灵长类动物的扩散模式不同。少数明确的非本地大型人类个体可能表明雄性南方古猿的活动范围相对较小，或者他们更喜欢白云岩景观。
