Article2010

A multivariate approach for discriminating bone accumulations created by spotted Hyenas and Leopards: harnessing actualistic data from east and Southern Africa

Manuel Domínguez Rodrigo · Travis Rayne Pickering

59 citations0/0 files storedJournal of taphonomy

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology Evolution and Paleontology Studies Archaeology and ancient environmental studies

Abstract

Hyenas and large felids were important contributions of bones to the Pliocene and Pleistocene paleontological record of South Africa and elsewhere. Thus, discerning the taphonomic signatures of each is of great importance to paleoanthropologists who view those carnivores as predators and/or competitors of early hominins. Several neotaphonomic studies have emphasized characteristics that distinguish faunas created by hyenas and large cats. Recognizing that many of these studies contend or imply independence in variables that are actually interdependent, we conducted multivariate analyses on published data (including prey skeletal part profiles, tooth mark frequencies, anatomical patterning of tooth marks on bones, number of tooth marks specimen [as a measure of gnawing], ungulate long limb bone [i. E., humeri, radioulnae, femora, tibiae and metapodials]) completeness and bone breakage) to demostrate that bone accumulating behaviour is quite variable for both hyenas and felids. Our results reveal that previously employed analogs are incomplete and transitory, and stress the need for more actualistic work on the topic. That work should lead to more fully realized referential analogs, replacing earlier, inferentially weak ones and providing powerful tools for archaeologists and paleontologistc to use is interpreting the formation of fossil faunas. We end our recomendations with tentative endorsement of prey mortality analysis-medaited by application of actualistically derived and taphonomically sensitized prey age frequency data- as an additional method for distinguishing hyena-and leopard-accumulated faunas.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

References

1983The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy 2007Deconstructing Olduvai: A Taphonomic Study of the Bed I Sites 1991Distinguishing Hyena from Hominid Bone Accumulations 1991Food procurement and transport by human and non-human predators 2002Reconsideration of criteria for differentiating faunal assemblages accumulated by hyenas and hominids 2000Leopards as Taphonomic Agents in Dolomitic Caves—Implications for Bone Accumulations in the Hominid-bearing Deposits of South Africa 2010Bovid mortality profiles in paleoecological context falsify hypotheses of endurance running–hunting and passive scavenging by early Pleistocene hominins 1995Paleoanthropological and paleoecological implications of the taphonomy of a sabertooth's den

Cited by

2018Neanderthal and carnivore activities at Llonin Cave, Asturias, northern Iberian Peninsula: Faunal study of Mousterian levels (MIS 3)2012Autochthony and orientation patterns in Olduvai Bed I: a re-examination of the status of post-depositional biasing of archaeological assemblages from FLK North (FLKN)2019Classifying agency in bone breakage: an experimental analysis of fracture planes to differentiate between hominin and carnivore dynamic and static loading using machine learning (ML) algorithms

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.