Collaborative Research: Rodent Diets and Habitat Reconstructions in South Africa: an Actualistic and Applied Multidisciplinary Study

合作研究：南非啮齿动物饮食和栖息地重建：一项现实主义和应用多学科研究

• 批准号: 0948283
• 负责人: Peter Ungar
• 金额: $ 5.2万
• 依托单位: University of Arkansas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-03-01 至 2014-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0948283&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Rodent; Diets; Habitat

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Sponheimer, Ungar, and Passey and an international team of colleagues will investigate the environmental context of human evolution. The team includes researchers from the U.S., Canada, Israel,and South Africa who will use their expertise in vertebrate paleontology, isotopic geochemistry, wildlife ecology, and human paleobiology to study human paleoecology through the lens of rodent dietary ecology. It has long been recognized that the ecological diversity and small home ranges of rodents make them particularly useful tools for reconstructing past environments. However, studies of rodent faunas have traditionally made assumptions about the ecology of fossil specimens rather than measuring dietary attributes directly. In contrast, this project will directly determine rodent diets to investigate the relationship between modern rodent dietary ecology and habitats, and then apply this knowledge to the South African human fossil record. Diet will be studied using dental microwear texture analysis, stable carbon isotope analysis, and strontium isotope analysis. The first two provide direct measures of dietary attributes (e.g., mechanical properties of foodstuffs, tree fruits/leaves versus grasses), while the last allows determination of where animals lived on the landscape, potentially resulting in more spatially-refined environmental reconstructions. The project will have three phases. In the first phase, the research team will conduct an extensive study of the relationship between modern rodent diets and habitat features. In the second phase, the team will determine the degree to which the diets of modern rodents from owl roosts reflect local habitats, essentially investigating the degree to which owl predation biases the environmental signal. The last phase will entail application of this knowledge to fossil sites in and around the Sterkfontein Valley, South Africa that are from ~2.5 million to ~700 thousand years old. The intellectual merit of this project is that it will provide new evidence of early hominin ecology and environments, and in so doing, will help address questions about hominin adaptations and evolution. For instance, did humans putative ancestors, big-brained early Homo, emerge in Africa only after significant deterioration of preferred enviroments, and did such environmental change contribute to the extinction of our smaller-brained, and presumably less adaptable, evolutionary "cousin" Paranthropus? It will also establish a firmer basis for using rodent dietary ecology to reconstruct paleoenvironments, which will be of broad utility at other archaeological and paleontological sites. In addition, it will mark the first time that multiple techniques have been used to investigate the intersection of animal diets, abundances, and environmental/climatic parameters over long (2 million year) timescales. Furthermore, the analytical developments to be made as part of this project will be of use for fields beyond archaeology including biological anthropology, geology, geochemistry, conservation ecology and paleontology. The broader impacts of this study are that it will foster international collaboration, provide training for students from underrepresented groups, enrich undergraduate teaching and graduate mentoring, and be used as a platform for bettering public understanding of science and technology. This is especially relevant for the University of Arkansas, a public university in an underfunded EPSCoR State.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，博士。 Sponheimer，Ungar和Passey以及国际同事团队将调查人类进化的环境环境。该团队包括来自美国，加拿大，以色列和南非的研究人员，他们将在脊椎动物古生物学，同位素地球化学，野生动植物生态学和人类古生物学方面使用其专业知识，通过啮齿动物饮食生态学的镜头来研究人类古生物学。长期以来，人们已经认识到，生态多样性和小型啮齿动物范围使它们成为重建过去环境的特别有用工具。但是，对啮齿动物动物群的研究传统上是对化石标本的生态学的假设，而不是直接测量饮食属性。相比之下，该项目将直接确定啮齿动物饮食，以研究现代啮齿动物饮食生态学与栖息地之间的关系，然后将此知识应用于南非人类化石记录。饮食将使用牙科微粒纹理分析，稳定的碳同位素分析和标同位素分析来研究饮食。前两个提供了饮食属性的直接度量（例如，食品的机械性能，树果/叶与草与草），而最后一个允许确定动物在景观上的位置，可能导​​致更空间改良的环境重建。该项目将有三个阶段。在第一阶段，研究团队将对现代啮齿动物饮食与栖息地特征之间的关系进行广泛的研究。在第二阶段，团队将确定猫头鹰栖息地的现代啮齿动物饮食反映当地栖息地的程度，从本质上研究了猫头鹰捕食偏向环境信号的程度。最后一个阶段将需要将此知识应用于南非斯特克方丹山谷及其周围的化石场地，其历史了约250万至70万年。该项目的智力优点在于，它将提供早期人类生态和环境的新证据，而这样做，将有助于解决有关人类适应和进化的问题。例如，人类假定的祖先，大脑的早期同性恋，仅在偏爱的环境严重恶化后才出现在非洲，并且这种环境变化是否有助于灭绝我们较小的脑，大概是适应性较小的，进化的“进化” cousin'cousin'paranthropus？它还将建立更牢固的基础，以使用啮齿动物饮食生态学重建古环境，这将在其他考古和古生物学遗址具有广泛的实用性。此外，这将标志着第一次使用多种技术研究动物饮食，丰度和环境/气候参数的相交。此外，作为该项目的一部分进行的分析发展将用于考古之外的领域，包括生物人类学，地质学，地球化学，保护生态学和古生物学。这项研究的更广泛的影响是，它将促进国际合作，为来自代表性不足的团体的学生提供培训，丰富本科教学和研究生指导，并被用作增进公众对科学技术的理解的平台。这与阿肯色大学（University of Arkansas）尤其重要，这是一所资金不足的EPSCOR州立大学的公立大学。