0000000000482345
AUTHOR
Anne-marie Bacon
Zinc isotopes in Late Pleistocene fossil teeth from a Southeast Asian cave setting preserve paleodietary information
Significance Dietary habits, especially meat consumption, represent a key aspect in the behavior and evolution of fossil hominin species. Here, we explore zinc (Zn) isotope ratios in tooth enamel of fossil mammals. We show discrimination between different trophic levels and demonstrate that Zn isotopes could prove useful in paleodietary studies of fossil hominin, or other mammalian species, to assess their consumption of animal versus plant resources. We also demonstrate the high preservation potential of pristine diet-related Zn isotope ratios, even under tropical conditions with poor collagen preservation, such as the studied depositional context in Southeast Asia. However, assessing the …
Nitrogen isotopic composition of tooth enamel organic matter records trophic position in modern and fossil ecosystems
Abstract Nitrogen isotopes are widely used to study the trophic position of animals in modern food webs, however, their application in the fossil record is severely limited by degradation of organic material during fossilization. In this study, we show that the nitrogen isotopic composition of organic matter preserved in mammalian tooth enamel (δ15Nenamel) records diet and trophic position in modern and fossil ecosystems. The δ15Nenamel of modern African mammals shows a trophic enrichment of 3.7 ‰ between herbivores and carnivores, as well as a strong positive correlation between δ15Nenamel and δ15Nbone-collagen values from the same individuals. δ15Nenamel values of Late Pleistocene fossil …
Trophic ecology of a Late Pleistocene early modern human from tropical Southeast Asia inferred from zinc isotopes
Tam Pà Ling, a cave site in northeastern Laos, has yielded the earliest skeletal evidence of Homo sapiens in mainland Southeast Asia. The reliance of Pleistocene humans in rainforest settings on plant or animal resources is still largely unstudied, mainly due to poor collagen preservation in fossils from tropical environments precluding stable nitrogen isotope analysis, the classical trophic level proxy. However, isotopic ratios of zinc (Zn) in bioapatite constitute a promising proxy to infer trophic and dietary information from fossil vertebrates, even under adverse tropical taphonomic conditions. Here, we analyzed the zinc isotope composition (66Zn/64Zn expressed as δ66Zn value) in the en…
Redécouverte d'une faune pléistocène dans les remplissages karstiques de Tam Hang au Laos : premiers résultats.
12 pages; The discovery of a Pleistocene fauna in karstic fills at TamHang in Laos: preliminary results. TamHang, located in northeastern Laos, in the Hua Pan province, is a reference site not only for its numerous archaeological and human remains, but also for its two faunal assemblages, whose composition suggests different dating in the Pleistocene. Discovered in 1934 by Jacques Fromaget, a new excavation of the site has been undertaken in 2003. During this campaign, at Tam Hang south, 575 isolated teeth of mammals were extracted from a deep layer of calcareous breccia. This assemblage corresponds to that one described by Arambourg and Fromaget [C. Arambourg, J. Fromaget, Le gisement quat…