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6 million years of savanna
Date:8/3/2011

on grasses are C3 plants, which include beans and most vegetables. C4 plants are warm-season or tropical grasses that dominate savannas, and plants called sedges. C4 plants have a higher ratio of carbon-13 than C3 plants.

The isotope composition of fossil soil gives a measure of the total makeup of the ecosystem in terms of how much canopy versus how much open landscape, Cerling says. So in a forest, even soil from open gaps shows the C3 signature because of non-woody C3 plants growing there, while on a savanna, soil from under a C3 tree will show the C4 signature because of grasses growing under the tree.

The Findings: A History of Savanna

Cerling and colleagues used the new method to analyze fossil soils and infer plant cover back to 7.4 million years ago, a period that includes when human ancestors and apes split from a common ancestor.

Their analysis of 1,300 fossil soil samples from sites at or near where human ancestors and their relatives evolved shows that more than 70 percent of the sites had less than 40 percent woody cover, meaning they were wooded grasslands or grasslands. Less than 1 percent of the samples reflected sites where tree cover exceeded 70 percent.

"Therefore, 'closed' forests (more than 80 percent woody cover) represent a very small fraction of the environments represented by these paleosols," the researchers write.

"We conclude there have been open savannas all the time for which we have hominin fossils in the environments where the fossils were found during the past 4.3 million years" the oldest fossils now accepted as human ancestors, Cerling says.

The researchers also created vegetation chronologies of the Awash Valley of Ethiopia and the Omo-Turkana Basin of Ethiopia and Kenya home to many fossils of human ancestors, including Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Paranthropus and our own genus, Homo.

They found that during the past 7.4 million years, woody cove
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Contact: Lee Siegel
lee.siegel@utah.edu
801-581-8993
University of Utah
Source:Eurekalert  

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