From meat availability to hominin and carnivore biomass: A paleosynecological approach to reconstructing predator-prey biomass ratios in the Pleistocene

Abstract

Reconstructing the conditions and circumstances under which the human lineage evolved is of great interest to those disciplines related to human evolution, especially in fields such as archaeoecology and human paleoecology. A mathematical model was presented almost a decade ago aimed to reconstructing the human populations that the Pleistocene paleoecosystems could support. This model followed a paleosynecological perspective, being focused on: (i) estimating the availability of meat resources in the paleoecosystems, as these resources are vital for human survival; and (ii) measuring the level of competition for these resources among the members of the carnivore guild, including hominins. The model has been applied since then to several Pleistocene localities of Europe, with particular emphasis on the Orce and Sierra de Atapuerca sites. In this study, we use the model for estimating predator-prey biomass ratios and compare the model outputs with the values measured in present-day African ecosystems. The results obtained confirm that our paleosynecological approach provides estimates of predator-prey biomass ratios that are broadly similar to those measured in the extant ecosystems. However, our estimates tend to be slightly higher than expected, which is probably due to the weight of species that satisfy part of their nutritional requirements with resources other than the meat from large herbivores. This allows us to assume that our model performs relatively well, although it has room for methodological improvements.