Soil and plant phytoliths from the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics at Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania)

Julio Mercader; Siobhán Clarke; Mariam Bundala; Julien Favreau; Jamie Inwood; Makarius Itambu; Fergus Larter; Patrick Lee; Garnet Lewiski-McQuaid; Neduvoto Mollel; Aloyce Mwambwiga; Robert Patalano; María Soto; Laura Tucker; Dale Walde

doi:10.7717/peerj.8211

Soil and plant phytoliths from the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics at Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania)

PeerJ. 2019 Dec 11:7:e8211. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8211. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Julio Mercader^{1

2}, Siobhán Clarke¹, Mariam Bundala^{1

3}, Julien Favreau¹, Jamie Inwood¹, Makarius Itambu^{1

3}, Fergus Larter¹, Patrick Lee^{1

4}, Garnet Lewiski-McQuaid¹, Neduvoto Mollel⁵, Aloyce Mwambwiga^{1

6}, Robert Patalano¹, María Soto¹, Laura Tucker¹, Dale Walde⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
² Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
³ Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
⁴ Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
⁵ Tropical Pesticides Research Institute, National Herbarium of Tanzania, Arusha, Tanzania.
⁶ Arusha National Natural History Museum, Arusha, Tanzania.
⁷ ASM Research Group, Cochrane, Canada.

Abstract

This article studies soil and plant phytoliths from the Eastern Serengeti Plains, specifically the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics from Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania, as present-day analogue for the environment that was contemporaneous with the emergence of the genus Homo. We investigate whether phytolith assemblages from recent soil surfaces reflect plant community structure and composition with fidelity. The materials included 35 topsoil samples and 29 plant species (20 genera, 15 families). Phytoliths were extracted from both soil and botanical samples. Quantification aimed at discovering relationships amongst the soil and plant phytoliths relative distributions through Chi-square independence tests, establishing the statistical significance of the relationship between categorical variables within the two populations. Soil assemblages form a spectrum, or cohort of co-ocurring phytolith classes, that will allow identifying environments similar to those in the Acacia-Commiphora ecozone in the fossil record.

Keywords: Acacia-Commiphora woodland and grassland mosaics; African palaeoenvironments; Analog for early human evolution; East Africa; Reference collections; Soil and plant phytoliths.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant 895-2016-1017. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.