Significance Testing ecological hypotheses of human evolution requires an understanding of the ancient plant and animal communities within which our ancestors lived. Though present-day ecosystems provide the baseline for reconstructing the ecological context of human evolution, the extent to which modern ecosystems are representative of past ones is unknown. Through analyses of a fossil dataset spanning the last 7 Myr, we show that eastern African communities of large-bodied mammalian herbivores differed markedly from those today until ∼700,000 y ago. Because large herbivores are ecosystem engineers and shape biotic communities in ways that impact a wide variety of species, this implies that the vast majority of early human evolution transpired in the context of ecosystems that functioned unlike any known today.
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