Messinian Age and Savannah Environment of the Possible Hominin Graecopithecus from Europe

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2017 May 23

PMID 28531204

Citations 10

Authors

Madelaine Bohme

Nikolai Spassov

Martin Ebner

Denis Geraads

Latinka Hristova

Uwe Kirscher

Sabine Kotter

Ulf Linnemann

Jerome Prieto

Socrates Roussiakis

George Theodorou

Gregor Uhlig

Michael Winklhofer

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Dating fossil hominids and reconstructing their environments is critically important for understanding human evolution. Here we date the potentially oldest hominin, Graecopithecus freybergi from Europe and constrain the environmental conditions under which it thrived. For the Graecopithecus-bearing Pikermi Formation of Attica/Greece, a saline aeolian dust deposit of North African (Sahara) provenance, we obtain an age of 7.37-7.11 Ma, which is coeval with a dramatic cooling in the Mediterranean region at the Tortonian-Messinian transition. Palaeobotanic proxies demonstrate C4-grass dominated wooded grassland-to-woodland habitats of a savannah biome for the Pikermi Formation. Faunal turnover at the Tortonian-Messinian transition led to the spread of new mammalian taxa along with Graecopithecus into Europe. The type mandible of G. freybergi from Pyrgos (7.175 Ma) and the single tooth (7.24 Ma) from Azmaka (Bulgaria) represent the first hominids of Messinian age from continental Europe. Our results suggest that major splits in the hominid family occurred outside Africa.

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