Regional diversity patterns in African bovids, hyaenids, and felids during the past 3 million years: the role of taphonomic bias and implications for the evolution of Paranthropus

Reconstructing patterns of Plio-Pleistocene mammalian faunal exchange between eastern and southern Africa may help us to better understand patterns of evolution within the hominin clade. However, differences in geological context, taphonomic history and collection methods, as well as a lack of a precise chronology in one of the regions, complicate attempts to compare the faunas of the two regions, but access to new comprehensive datasets encouraged us to re-examine this critical time period in the African paleontological record. In this study, we examine the biogeographic histories of three terrestrial African mammalian families whose fossil records span the past 3 million years to test hypotheses related to the evolutionary history of the hominin genus Paranthropus. We used presence/absence data for 117 species from 38 genera within the family Bovidae and 34 species from 15 genera within the families Hyaenidae and Felidae from 52 eastern African and 40 southern African fossil localities. These assemblages were placed into 500 ka time slices and compared at both the genus and species level using the Jaccard index of faunal similarity. Our findings indicate that sampling biases have more effect on the patterns of interchange between eastern and southern African Bovidae than they do the patterns of interchange seen in the Hyaenidae and Felidae. However, even when these biases are taken into account there are persistent differences in the degree of interchange within and between these families. These findings suggest that mammalian groups (including hominins) can have very different histories of exchange between eastern and southern Africa over the past 3 million years.There is no a priori reason why any of the three families we examined is a suitable proxy for the eastern and southern African hyper-megadont and megadont hominin taxa presently included in Paranthropus, but of the three we suggest that the Bovidae is likely to come closest to being an appropriate proxy. The results of this comparative study are consistent with relatively independent evolutionary trajectories in the two regions for the hominins that are presently included in the genus Paranthropus.